To Have and Have Not

        When the Blizzard of ’77 was over, in late January of that year, with six foot+ piles of snow on either side of cleared roads, sidewalks, and driveways making passage once again possible, and I had officially escaped from the new job at the truck repair shop, I trekked the sidewalks of downtown Buffalo one day and put in applications at any business on Main Street that was open and caught my eye.

        I stopped at a place toward the University of Buffalo area of Main that sold prostheses. There was one man there; he owned the business, and on that day he was the only employee. I asked if he was hiring – he said that business was slow, but he took my info and promised he would call when things picked up a little.

        Then I went into an agency that staffs companies with secretaries. I took a typing test so they could record how many words a minute I could type. Since only the correctly spelled words were counted, my score was embarrassingly miserable. What was I doing there? After a bit of a high at the prosthesis business, the staffing place was a new super low.

        Next stop was a company on Main closer to downtown. It sold biological media. I knew nothing else about the place, but decided the people definitely needed my resume. The front door was locked and had a buzzer – that meant that I would be looked over before being allowed in – well, there goes that chance! But to my surprise, the front office let me in with the explanation that the doorway was popular at night for the occasional homeless person to sleep in and sometimes used by day for urination. Yes, it was that close to downtown, and yes, even Buffalo, as cold as it sometimes is, has its homeless population.

        This company only employed about 20 people, and I was told they were not hiring at the moment, but my resume was taken, and I assumed, filed away.

        My primary goal on Main Street that day was to fill out an application and leave a resume at Roswell Park Memorial Institute. It was within walking distance of the just mentioned lab with the locked front door. There was a huge personnel department at Roswell – I was not able to go from lab to lab to chat up anyone. I could hope for the best, but had a sinking feeling I would be lost in the system never to resurface again.

        Back at home for the rest of the winter, I lived on the hope that the prosthesis guy would call when the weather got better and his business got busy again. I even called him after about a month, and he assured me he would be needing me soon.

        In April I got a call one night from the biological media company. Could I start work the next day? No interview? No job description? I was told they were short in their powdered media department and from the resume, I appeared to be qualified to do the tasks involved.

        That was how I became the self-named Powder Lady. The powdered media department of the company was one person – me. I had a tiny room in the basement of this two story building – the room had two scales and most of the powders I would need to put together the different media that they sold. This was mostly stuff for tissue culture – if you put living cells into liquid media and store them at a temperature they like and decent pH and humidity, the cells will continue to live for a while and sometimes even multiply – which is handy for research purposes and/or for collecting of substances that the cells might produce.

        There were many different recipes that were put together since different cell cultures have different requirements. I put all the ingredients into a ceramic pot that was a little bigger than a Dutch oven one might use in a kitchen. When all the ingredients were in the ceramic pot, some ceramic balls were added, and a lid with a latch, and I put the pot on a cart and wheeled it to the elevator. The elevator was an open device and very old – ‘way cool. The pot and I then took the elevator to the second floor of the building – part of the second floor was the shipping department, and the rest of it looked like an attic with storage space and stuff that was not being used anymore was just lying around – this storage area was where the mill mechanism was installed. I would put the ceramic pot on its side on the mill, turn a switch, and the pot began to spin. The ceramic balls inside would pulverize all the powder into a homogeneous mix. The mill ran for about a day. Sometimes, if there was any moisture inside, the stuff turned into a sticky mess and would have to be thrown away. I learned a lot of lessons thanks to that mill!

        After milling, I do not recall putting the finished powdered media into bottles – so I guess someone else did that. The mill would get washed, and a new batch of something would be put together.

        Although the company was small and I was in my little powder room most of the work day, there were a few memorable co-workers. One was a young woman about my age from California – her husband’s job had transferred him to Buffalo, and she came with him. “I hate Buffalo drivers!” she once proclaimed in the company breakroom. “They sometimes drive down the left side of the street!”

        I thought about her comment for a while and imagined the context in which I might drive down the left side of the street, and then I responded, “Well, only if we are making a left turn!” you know, and it’s clear, and why not! California drivers have such a reputation for being crazy, and here was someone born and raised in California claiming Buffalonians were the crazy ones!

        There was another co-worker there named Denise. She got to leave at 4 o’clock every day claiming that she did not break for lunch. I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal – the rest of the staff told me it was a privilege that only that Denise got - no one else was to try it. There are other places I’ve worked since then where there’s that one person who gets the I don’t eat lunch so I only have to be in the building eight hours a day perk and the rest of us are not supposed to stir those waters.

        One of the managers, after I had been working at the media place for a few weeks, finally chatted with me about my education and past experience. I remember telling him that what I learned most from my job at the agar factory was that management was more interested in quantity than quality. He nodded slightly and acknowledged that sadly that was the policy of this company also!

        There were two young women who, from what I can remember, washed glassware and other equipment. They enjoyed talking about their children and giving out maternal advice to the rest of us. One day I was carrying the ceramic pot down the hall, empty, to the washroom without the benefit of the cart. It was heavy. One of the women started to scold me and said that I would not be able to have children because of the damage to my uterus caused by carrying that heavy contraption! I was forewarned!

        One day the two women asked if I had any children. I smiled and said, “Oh no, I’m not even married!” They gave me a look like, Poor Thing, she does not know where babies come from! And I did not know how to answer that look so I let it go, but it has stuck with me always.

        And one day one of the glassware women asked me what was my understanding of a paid vacation?

        I said that a paid vacation is when you work long enough for a company that you have earned one or more days off, depending on that company’s policy, and you get paid for those days even though you are not at work, and you still have a job when you return from your days off.

        She said that I had it all wrong! That was not at all what a paid vacation is. She said a paid vacation is when your boss pays for you to take a vacation.

        “Well, yeah, you are not at the job, but you get paid anyway.”

        “No! you get paid to take a vacation – all the expenses of the vacation – transportation, hotel, food, entertainment – everything the boss pays for!”

        Wow! Talk about a perk! I’m sure that forty years later this woman is still convinced that she has been denied something that everyone else seems to have, and in all those years, no one has been able to get through to her that her kind of paid vacation simply does not exist. Or does it?

        Five months after starting work as the Powder Lady, Roswell called me in for an interview in the immunology research department. I left the media lab and began my new job at Roswell in September of ’77. A year after that, the guy from the prosthesis store called and begged me to come join him there. My Mom thought I should have given him a chance, but I did not want to mess up what was a good job at Roswell, after all, by then I had already earned paid vacation time!

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