From riding the Internet boom, to not in demand
By Jane Shiau, Globe Correspondent, 5/16/04
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Globe Staff Illustration
Anthony Schultz
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A few years ago, I'd been riding high. As a psychology major from an Ivy League school, I'd graduated in 1995 with a degree and no direction. I fell into a job at a medical library where I processed interlibrary books and article requests. In my spare time I taught myself HTML -- Web mark-up language -- and put up a personal Web page.
When the Internet boom began, I suddenly found myself in demand with a hot new career as a Web developer. By job-hopping from company to company, each one offering more benefits and perks, I soon doubled my starting salary.
I ended up at a well-regarded financial website. With millions of dollars in venture capital funding and a positive outlook for its eventual IPO, this was a company that had no problems spending money.
Every employee had a new computer, and some had two. Our office of about 40 employees had two kitchens, both stocked with a variety of free sodas, juices, and snacks.
We never ran out, though the company nearly doubled in size during my time there. It never occurred to me to wonder how the juice and snacks got into the kitchens, until it became my job.
I was luckier than most of those caught by the dot-com downturn. Rather than being laid off, I had voluntarily chosen to leave web development before the meltdown began.
After two years in the industry, I'd finally realized I needed more human contact than that provided by my programming jobs. But now even nontechnical jobs were being affected by the worsening economy. I was grateful I'd even gotten this temporary position.
Ostensibly, my position was ''day porter.''The company I now worked for had six kitchens on four floors that all needed restocking and cleaning on a regular basis. With seven coffees and twelve varieties of tea offered in each kitchen, it was a pity that I didn't even like caffeinated drinks.
The necessity of refilling the kitchens every other day made it clear that people were indeed using them, despite the rows of empty cubicles that I walked through on my way to reach them during my workday. Clearly, even if they weren't working, the employees were at least eating.
One of the few people who spoke to me with any recognition of my individuality was the delivery guy. On my third day, he advised me to lie to my temp agency and tell them I had another job that paid higher.
''You'd be surprised how quickly they can find the money to pay you a higher rate,'' he said, while he unloaded bottles of spring water into the cooler.
The other person who looked me in the eyes was a quiet, short man on the second floor whom I suspected of trying to pick me up, notwithstanding my wedding ring.
Still, he treated me better than the other employees who preferred to ignore me. One day, two men in business suits were talking as I entered a kitchen and began to restock the different flavors of coffee.
They continued their conversation without pausing or acknowledging my entrance. While I tried to work around them, they discussed DIRECTV, having ''the TiVo'' to record their favorite televised sporting events, and how Sudbury still didn't have cable modem access available, despite its reputation as a rich town.
''Even the Cape has it!'' one man complained. I wondered how they would react if the help suddenly piped in with, ''We have TiVo at home, too.''
The difference a year made was painful -- and not just during kitchen duty. Once I worked at a company where spare computers were easier to find than pens. Now I was using a permanent employee's computer during her lunch break. When my supervisor handed me a list of figures to add, I tentatively suggested that I use the computer's spreadsheet program to enter the data and automatically calculate the total.
Not only would this be faster and more accurate than adding the numbers by hand, but she could update the spreadsheet immediately when she received more numbers next month. Tactfully, I didn't mention that my handwriting was terrible, and that I could format the spreadsheet so that it was easier to read than any list I might write.
''No,'' she decided. ''I'd rather have it hand-printed. You can just add it a few times on the calculator to make sure the total is correct.''
I painstakingly copied her handwritten list of figures onto a photocopy of the spreadsheet with too-small rows, then used her calculator to add up the columns several times. Without benefit of a computer, I decided that best two out of three was a keeper, and used that as my final tally.
The greatest reminder of how far I'd fallen occurred one day when a catering company had delivered an employee breakfast to the fourth-floor kitchen. While I wiped the counters and refilled the individual coffee packets on their stand, an employee helped himself to the buffet. He peered into one metal chafing dish, turned to me and asked, ''Excuse me, but what is this?''
In that mortified second, I realized he had mistaken me for a kitchen worker. In an attempt to distance myself from the kitchen, I quickly said, ''I have absolutely no idea.''
He looked puzzled. I knew that he assumed that someone wiping the kitchen counters was no different from someone who prepared the food. But as the counter-wiper, I knew how many levels of ''kitchen staff'' there actually were, and I felt indignant about being mistaken for a lowly hash-slinger.
At the same time, I felt embarrassed about what my reaction said about my own assumptions. Who was I to say the hash-slingers were lower than me? At least they had steady jobs. I certainly didn't. My supervisor checked her budget for the fiscal year a few days later and told me they had run out of money to pay me. ''Come back next year,'' she said.
The new year was only a week and a half away, so I turned in my security badge. On my way out of the building, I stopped in the restroom to wash an ink stain from my hands. I smiled at the cleaning lady, who was busy wiping the water from around the sinks. For all I knew, she'd been a programmer once, too.
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