I'm so.... PROMPT! (Part I- the Beginning)

Fine, the original joke was about being punctual, but stay with me here.  And shut the TARDIS door, because we're going way back again!

We had our biweekly poetry open mic in our living rooms last night.  We may have found a new Real Life Home for it once things open up some more, but overall the Zooms have gone pretty well since, that one time....

(Not that we've been a bunch of prudes. Two weeks ago, we had an extended discussion of the NYC Health Department's sex-during-COVID guidelines, and last night turned into a somewhat kinky discussion of PlayStations.)

I stuck to haiku, at first.  Particularly, one I'd forgotten I'd written earlier in the day for a musician friend who posted, I guess it's not a poetry year if it has taken me 7 months to create a "2020 Poems" folder.  I went with something that artists hear all the time:

We love your music
But we're not gonna pay you
You'll get exposure!

But the memory time for me came during the second half of the session: participants are given "prompts," which can be anything from a couple of words to a quote to a question, and given a few short minutes to riff on it.  The hosts used to pass out slips of paper to participants when we were all in the same room; Zoom has required pulling them out of a jar, or more recently, spinnnnning the big wheel to assign a particular one.

Here's what I got last night:



In the few alloted minutes, I made two quick decisions. One, I knew exactly which "mistake" to write about; but two, I decided, for the first time, to just wing it when my turn came rather than writing it all out or even going with notes.  It's recorded someplace, and I may track it down eventually, but here, first, is the short and versier version of what I picked.

It's called "I Quit."

Of all the turning points in my life,
Not that many were matters of choice
-At least not by me.
The times I almost died in moments of clumsiness or stupidity,
The relationships that ended without me in them,
Many other roads not taken,
Those were no choice, or somebody else's choice, not mine.

So that only leaves a few.
I've never been fired from a job, and I've only quit two of them.
The big one, the one that brought me here, to this home,
This family as I know it, all of this, and now all of you?
NOT a mistake.

That was older.
I was younger.
I was finding my way and found a stop along the path that could have turned permanent.
I had responsibility, I had authority, and in hindsight I had privilege.
And one day, out of the blue, it was all taken away-
Through a hostile takeover.
(You can have hostile takeovers inside a university? Who knew?!?)
In a flash, I had a new boss, no title, no history or goodwill.
I did not take it well.
I shouted "I quit!," tore my time card in half, and stormed out.
Not a good move.  Half an hour later, I came back with contrition and scotch tape.
I tried to take it all back so they would take me back.
They wouldn't. That bridge was burned.

But when the bridge burned, others beckoned.
My studies, my writing, my options for beyond the books, all went to the direction they'd been meant to be.
I worried, but I thrived. It led me here, and eventually here for good,
With a family and home I love, and people I would never have known if it hadn't been for that moment.
My bad.  My good.

Some of that's revisionist, but it got a good reaction.  Now, some filling in of the back story.

----

I worked my way, at least in part, through college and law school.  Freshman year brought a financial aid package that included a "work-study" component. It was here that I got the dreaded assignment, not to a nice clean job in the library that Mom was expecting, but to the dregs of the dining hall shoving privileged leavings into trash cans and Hobart the Dish Machine.  Gradually, I worked my way up from that.  Cornell Dining was a business unto itself, recognized nationally for offering selections of both food and payment plans that went way beyond the standard "meal ticket" and "mystery meat" offerings of college campuses of the day.  In addition to their student union and central campus dining halls, they ran the campus vending business, a casual but sit-down restaurant that you got two trips a year to on your dining card, a couple of small grocery stores that will be important later, and the occasional experiment. 

One of the latter was their attempt to compete with what, then, were the only two options for delivery of pizza to campus dorms.  One was a primordial franchise of Domino's, then using surplus Postal Service jeeps to deliver their wares (we called them "meat wagons"), the other an unremarkable grease joint named Pirro's.  Much better pizza could be had in Collegetown, but they did not deliver.  So to fill the void, some Dining poobah invented "the easiest course on campus"-

-Pizza 101.

A handful of us from the regular dining hall shifts either volunteered or were drafted into this venture.  The downside was the hours- we had to feed hungry freshmen until midnight or beyond- but the work was a lot better than slopping meatloaf onto clean plates or shoving dirty plates into hot machines.  Although the product wasn't the best- we used premade crusts at first, eventually learning on-the-job how to create them from raw dough- the advantages to the customers made up for it. We were closer than the downtown shops, and we took Cornellcard- the $200-limit credit card given to every student and added to the tuition bill if you didn't pay it.  We even delivered to a small range of off-campus apartments. This will also be important later.

We developed some pretty good camaraderie, and I am still in touch with one of the guys.  Eventually, I got out of the dishroom altogether between those hours and also starting work in one of those little campus grocery stores.  This one also had late hours, but not as late.  Picture a standard 7-Eleven. Now cut it into three pieces and throw away two of them. That was us.  It sold the real basics- milk products from the Cornell Dairy, Coke in genuine glass returnable bottles long before a Bottle Bill mandated that, dorm-food staples, HBA's as many retailers still call them, and of course the vital products of beer and ciggies that could then be sold to 18-year olds. 

In addition to stocking the shelves and cashing occasionally when one of my assorted crush cashiers was on break, I volunteered to do some of the vendor check-ins, usually early in the day. They'd come in at the Stewart Avenue loading dock of the student union, and I'd sign for the order, put it on a hand cart and pop it up the elevator to the store.  One consequence of this activity was I knew the postal street address of Noyes Center, one of the few campus buildings that had one besides its "Rich Alumni Donor Hall" moniker.

Armed with this information, I pulled off one of my favorite all-time stunts on the Pizza Boys.  From my dorm room on a night off, I called 256-5320 (yes, I still remember the number), ordered a pepperoni and mushroom 'za, and told them to deliver it to 635 Stewart Avenue, second floor.   They had no idea until they got out on the street that I had essentially gotten them to deliver a pizza to themselves.  I'm sure I paid for it- one way or the other.

Pizza 101 failed its final and was not back for sophomore year when I returned there from my one and final summer back on Long Island.  So I upped my store hours, and eventually took a second job at the larger version of the "Pick-Up" in the basement of that sitdown restaurant.  Things that year became, as my mother used to say, "compicated."  Because of the falling-out with my father that culminated in my shaking dust off my feet and never going back there to live- also not a mistake- he would not give me the information I needed to submit a financial aid application for me after freshman year, and I was too close in time to declare myself "emancipated" and apply on my own. That meant no scholarships except the $250 Regents one, no outright government aid except something called TAP that everybody got, and no loans or work-study through the university.

Loans? No problem. Marine Midland Bank was happy to sign me up no questions asked.  And I could still work on-campus, but I had to take a cut in pay. I was now "non-SEMP:" that was Cornellspeak for work-study, aka the Student Employee Matching Program, where Uncle Sam paid half the work-studier's gross pay. Fortunately, my mad skillz kept me in the running for the smaller number of slots that SEMP students did not fill. 

I stayed on in both stores through sophomore year and into that summer; either that one or the following one, I also signed on to Cornell Vending, filling the machines and helping Clara run a 6 a.m. coffee service for the lifers coming in to work in the other dining halls.  These opened and closed sporadically over the summer as reunioners and summer students came and went, but I managed to keep my books cracked and balanced between all of these good efforts of the Dining department.  I was developing actual retailing responsibility- forecasting orders, entering data into spreadsheets which then literally were that, green-lined sheets of paper.  That fall, the Career Center started setting up interviews for juniors for corporate training programs the following summer, and quite a few of them were in retail. Most of those would have returned me to New York.  It was beginning to seem almost inevitable....

until the Big Mistake.

(I think I will split this into two parts. Stay tuned.)

I'm so.... PROMPT! (Part II- You're My Favorite Mistake)

When we left our hero, he was just beginning his third undergraduate year. Required courses and distributions, even the dreaded four semesters of phys ed, were all behind, and major decisions beckoned. Both capital-"M" for what department and specialty within it would I pursue my degree in, and the lower-but-longer-"m" for what lifetime decisions would be coming out of the crucial fall of 1979. 

Unlike most of my fellow students, I came in knowing I would be an English major and by the end stayed that way. Only now I had a major advisor in the English department- a comp lit and modern drama specialist named Scott McMillin, alas no longer with us- and I had done well enough in a range of English courses to qualify for the Honors program, which would get from me a Senior Thesis, and in exchange give to me an additional thesis advisor- a Shakespearean scholar named Barry Adams, retired as of a few years ago and still

::checks for the obligatory punch-in-the gut obituary::
::nope, but his lovely wife of 51 years died in 2014::

Professor Emeritus in the English department.

In addition to taking this on, I was now a full-fledged reporter for the Cornell Sun, but had done little to distinguish myself before junior year and was relegated to the city beat, which mostly meant attending boring city council meetings and covering the rare news occurrence at crosstown Ithaca College (which, yeahyeah, will be important later).  I was also movin' on up in managing that little grocery store while adding some here-and-there hours at the larger one across campus. I began to have thoughts of making my way in business rather than writing my way into a career.  I was at the point that I had first crack on hours on the floor, could do other parts of the job whenever I wanted, and was maybe even given a Real Title of "assistant manager."

Time to knock THAT hubris to the ground, yo.

----

That mostly-freshman-inhabited residential part of campus centered around a typically 60s-butt-ugly three story bunker, named "Noyes Center" after a banker baron and the then-president of the University trustees.  It's one of a ton of buildings there, now or former, named for him or his brood.  This particular one came down in 2006 along with the six post-war cinderblock Cheapo residences called "U-Halls," all identical and all but one regarded as so ugly that no donor would place a name on one. Here is Noyes on the right as it stood sometime near my time, one of the U-Halls in the foreground:



Wow, Ithaca, just like I pictured it. Snow, and everything.

Organizationally, Noyes was divided between two separate Campus Life functions.  Its second floor was the exclusive province of Cornell Dining, and those ovens and phones also housed the short-lived Pizza 101 of my past.  Upstairs on three were mostly lounges and reservable activity rooms.  The ground floor was centered by a "desk" with information, keys to those upstairs rooms, recreation equipment and candy sales; the first floor also housed offices for the building's managers as well as a Pub (THAT was gone before I graduated with the drinking age raised from 18 to 19 to 21 in those years). That whole ground floor was, with one exception, under the jurisdiction of University Unions.  No, not the collective bargaining kind- Cornell fought like a banshee to keep those out until late in my tenure- but the umbrella department running the student unions of West, North and Central campuses.  The only sore thumb on that organizational structure was my lil' corner of the world, the store along one wall of the ground floor- squarely within Unions territory, but operated by and accountable to the Dining people one floor up.

Somebody in the Math department- or maybe Art?- was displeased by this lack of symmetry. And so one fall afternoon after my morning classes, I bopped into Noyes Center, went to punch in on the second floor, and saw a note on my time card:

See Jeanette in Room 144.

I knew who she was, although I'd never spoken a word with her.  She was in management of the Unions businesses in that building.  I then learned that in the time after my last punchout, our store's operations had been transferred from the one department to the other.  She, and minions of her choosing, would be doing the ordering, the scheduling, all the things I'd been doing.  I could keep my hours already set to work on the floor, but my management days were over as far as she was concerned. No, there was no application process to reapply for my own job. There'd been turf wars over stupid things like elevator use, and she didn't need no stinkin' Dining workers.
 

Watch on YouTube

In an outburst rarely seen before or since, I told her, at a minimum, that I quit, marched up the back stairwell, tore my timecard in half and stormed back to my dorm room....

the one I would need to pay for in two months. Along with tuition, and stuff.

THAT cooled the ol' head really fast. About half an hour later,  as I said last night, came the contrition and scotch tape.  Jeanette was in no mood to see me. I waited. I apologized. There may have even been groveling. Of course I would be happy to keep as many hours as they were willing to give me.

Which they were. Only that number was, and forever would be, zero.

----

Good things:

* I still had A job.  In the other store that Dining was still running and would run until the eventual conversion of that building to a computer lab some years after I left. It's since been again repurposed and renamed, wait for it, the Tang Welcome Center.



Wow! Just like the astronauts drink!

(And if you think THAT's weird, the central campus gathering spot is now named Ho Plaza.)

* Just as important, I had no break in my employment history.  I'm sure my bosses in the bigger store heard about my little tantrum, but remembering that it was a tiff between the two departments that led to the hostile takeover, I suspect there was a little enemy-of-my-enemy vibe going on, and if I wasn't welcomed with open arms, I at least stayed in good graces.  (There was only one consequence not long after: I was working in the store still run by Dining one day when one of the vendors, who I'd been on a more equal basis with across campus, came in.  I must've questioned something about the order or otherwise gone beyond my pay grade- he complained about me to a real manager and I got written up for it. Needless to say, it never happened again.)

* But what makes this my Best Mistake? I lost all taste for being IN business, as in the management of it. I continued to work in that store, and occasionally in the restaurant upstairs, for my remaining two years, but I never considered advancement within it as something I'd want and went back to dancing with the things wot brung me- my studies, my writing, and especially my reporting.  I now had only my scheduled shifts, which I religiously kept, but no more late nights closing up or early mornings counting beans (figurative or mung).  To this day, I have disliked hiring employees, have only brought myself to fire one of them, and in my main gig I have a payroll consisting entirely of me, myself and I.

----

I had my best semester ever after that, making Dean's List for the one and only time out of eight. My thesis topic was approved and eventually got me honors on my degree.  And midway through the spring that followed that sudden change in direction, that sleepy Ithaca College beat for the Cornell Sun awoke with a roar. A fraternity pledge was killed during a drunken initiation rite, and I was the lead reporter for our paper, soon for the daily papers out of Syracuse I'd work for the next year-plus, and some nationwide college press services.  That was  also around the time I decided to look into this law school thing, the first step being to take the stupid law boards- which I did the following summer, despite their best efforts to bite me back.

----

So there you have it. All because a guy spun a wheel and came up Mistake-nly.