Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (14 page)

Businessmen get very upset if they have to repeat their credit card number. Sometimes they’re talking to you and they’re talking to their partner and you’re trying to listen for the number. They’ll say something to their partner and you think it’s for you and they get irritated. You get very sensitive to people’s voices. Sometimes you get mad. Why should this man be yelling at me? I do feel put-down a lot.

But other times there’s a real sense of power. I can tell you when you have to stop talking. You have to pay me the money. If you don’t pay me the money, I can do this and this to you. You feel that more when you’re talking to people who have to pay for their calls, like sailors at the base. But with the businessmen, you get a feeling of helplessness. He can ruin you. You’ve got real power over the poorer people. They don’t even have a phone, so they can’t complain. This businessman can write a letter to Ma Bell. I’m more tolerant of the people who are calling from a pay phone and haven’t got much money. But businessmen, I make him pay for every second of his call. (Laughs.) I’m more powerful than him at the moment. (Laughs.)

I think telephone prices are really too high. Dialing direct is cheap, but the poorer people who don’t have private phones and have to use pay phones, the costs are exhorbitant. It’s preying on poor people.

You can always get a date over the phone if you want. I’ve gotten asked so many times. (Laughs.) You always make some little comment, especially when you’re bored late at night. I talk with a Southern accent or a Puerto Rican accent. Or try to make your voice real sexy, just to see what kind of reaction . . . No, no, I never accepted dates. (Laughs.) Nobody ever sounded . . .

A lot of times, they leave the phone and bill it to others. You call the number they gave and they say, “I don’t know him.” The operator isn’t charged for any of this, but they do keep track. How many calls you take, how well you mark your tickets, how many errors you make. You’re constantly being pushed.

If you’re depressed ’cause the day hasn’t gone right, it shows in how you talk to people. But again, some days are hysterically funny. I don’t keep with all the regulations. I always try to make a couple of jokes. Especially if you’re working late at night. Sometimes people on the lines are so funny, you’ll just sit there and laugh and laugh until tears roll down your face. (Laughs.)

Do I listen in on conversations? (Lowers voice) Some girls really do. I’ve never had the temptation to flip the switch. I don’t know why. This company is the kind who watches you all the time. The supervisor does listen to you a lot. She can push a button on this special console. Just to see if I’m pleasant enough, if I talk too much to the customers, if I’m charging the right amount, if I make a personal call. Ma Bell is listening. And you don’t know. That’s why it’s smart to do the right thing most of the time. Keep your nose clean.

They never asked me to listen in. ’Cause they’d be reversing all the things they ever said: secrecy of communications, privacy for the customers. I don’t think I would anyway. They can have the job.

Most people who have stayed as telephone operators are older women. Not too many young girls are there forever. Girls are more patient than older women. I was sitting next to one today. This man evidently left the phone and she was trying to get money from him. She yells, “Look at that bastard!” She started ringing real hard, “You come back here, you owe me money!” Really crabbily. If I did that, the supervisor would yell at me. But this lady’s been there for twenty years. They’re very permissive with their older ladies. A lot of them have ugly voices. But again, you’ve been working there twenty years and saying the same things for twenty years, my God, can you blame them? After twenty years you get real hard.

It’s a hard feeling when everyone’s in a hurry to talk to somebody else, but not to talk to you. Sometimes
you
get a feeling of need to talk to somebody. Somebody who wants to listen to you other than “Why didn’t you get me the right number?”

It’s something to run into somebody who says, “It’s a nice day out, operator. How’s your day, busy? Has it been a rough day?” You’re so thankful for these people. You say, “Oh yes, it’s been an awful day. Thank you for asking.”

 

I’m a college professor. As a communications specialist, I train students to become more sensitive and aware of interpersonal communication—symbolic behavior, use of words, as well as nonverbal behavior. I try to ignite symbols in your mind, so we can come to a point of agreement on language. This is an invisible industry. Since the Second World War we’ve had phenomenal growth. There are seven-thousand-plus strong teachers in this discipline.

I’m high on the work because this is the way life is going to be—persuading people. We’re communicating animals. We’re persuadeable animals. It’s not an unethical thing. It’s not the black mustache and the black greasy hair bit. There is an unethical way—we’re cognizant of the ways of demagogic persuasion—but we train students in the ethical way. Business communication is a very important field in our industry. We train people so they can humanize the spirit of both parties, the interviewer and the interviewee. In the first ten minutes of an interview, the interviewer has usually made up his mind. We find out the reasons. Through our kind of research we tell business: what you’re doing is productive or counterproductive.

I’m talking about specialists, that we’re accustomed to in the movie world. One guy blew up bridges, that’s all he could do. Here’s a guy who’s an oral specialist or writing or print or electronics. We’re all part of the family. Nobody has a corner on communication.

Many Ph.D.s in the field of speech are now in business as personnel directors. I have good friends who are religious communicators. I had the opportunity to go with a bank in a Southern state as director of information. I would have overseen all the interoffice and intraoffice communication behavior—all the written behavior—to get the whole system smoother. And what happens? Profit. Happiness in job behavior. Getting what’s deep down from them, getting their trust.

B. F. Skinner reaches over into our field. Good friends of mine study this kind of behavior so they can make better comments about interpersonal relationships. Communication figures in our lives whether it’s John Smith at the plant or President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Friends of mine are studying conflict communication: how people communicate when they’re under fire.

Take Jerry Friedheim.
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He appears to me to be a machine—dash—human voice of the Nixon administration on this very touchy issue. He is, in my perception, mechanical. His voice has the lack of emotion. It is like a voice typewriter. He produces. It’s good. Heads have to keep cool. Nixon uses his people wisely and gets the information he needs to help him: what kinds of behavior can be attracted to what kinds of messages. In the past four years, he has so carefully softened the power of the press that it’s being taken more lightly than ever before. That’s why the Watergate affair was so delicately brushed aside by the American people.

Communications specialists do have a sense of power. People will argue it’s a misuse of power. When a person has so much control over behavior, we’re distrustful. We must learn how to become humane at the same time.

 

When people ask you what you’re doing and you say stewardess, you’re really proud, you think it’s great. It’s like a stepping stone. The first two months I started flying I had already been to London, Paris, and Rome. And me from Broken Bow, Nebraska. But after you start working, it’s not as glamorous as you thought it was going to be.

They like girls that have a nice personality and that are pleasant to look at. If a woman has a problem with blemishes, they take her off. Until the appearance counselor thinks she’s ready to go back on. One day this girl showed up, she had a very slight black eye. They took her right off. Little things like that.

We had to go to stew school for five weeks. We’d go through a whole week of make-up and poise. I didn’t like this. They make you feel like you’ve never been out in public. They showed you how to smoke a cigarette, when to smoke a cigarette, how to look at a man’s eyes. Our teacher, she had this idea we had to be sexy. One day in class she was showing us how to accept a light for a cigarette from a man and never blow it out. When he lights it, just look in his eyes. It was really funny, all the girls laughed.

It’s never proper for a woman to light her own cigarette. You hold it up and of course you’re out with a guy who knows the right way to light the cigarette. You look into their eyes as they’re lighting your cigarette and you’re cupping his hand, but holding it just very light, so that he can feel your touch and your warmth. (Laughs.) You do not blow the match out. It used to be really great for a woman to blow the match out when she looked in his eyes, but she said now the man blows the match out.

The idea is not to be too obvious about it. They don’t want you to look too forward. That’s the whole thing, being a lady but still giving out that womanly appeal, like the body movement and the lips and the eyes. The guy’s supposed to look in your eyes. You could be a real mean woman. You’re a lady and doing all these evil things with your eyes.

She did try to promote people smoking. She said smoking can be part of your conversation. If you don’t know what to say, you can always pull out a cigarette. She says it makes you more comfortable. I started smoking when I was on the airlines.

Our airline picks the girl-next-door type. At one time they wouldn’t let us wear false eyelashes and false fingernails. Now it’s required that you wear false eyelashes, and if you do not have the right length nails, you wear false nails. Everything is supposed to be becoming to the passenger.

That’s the whole thing: meeting all these great men that either have great business backgrounds or good looking or different. You do meet a lot of movie stars and a lot of political people. but you don’t get to really visit with them that much. You never really get to go out with these men. Stewardesses are impressed only by name people. But a normal millionaire that you don’t know you’re not impressed about. The only thing that really thrills a stewardess is a passenger like Kennedy or movie stars or somebody political. Celebrities.

I think our average age is twenty-six. But our supervisors tell us what kind of make-up to wear, what kind of lipstick to wear, if our hair is not the right style for us, if we’re not smiling enough. They even tell us how to act when you’re on a pass. Like last night I met my husband. I was in plain clothes. I wanted to kiss him. But I’m not supposed to kiss anybody at the terminal. You’re not supposed to walk off with a passenger, hand in hand. After you get out of the terminal, that’s all yours.

The majority of passengers do make passes. The ones that do make passes are married and are business people. When I tell them I’m married, they say, “I’m married and you’re married and you’re away from home and so am I and nobody’s gonna find out.” The majority of those who make passes at you, you wouldn’t accept a date if they were friends of yours at home.

After I was a stewardess for a year, and I was single, I came down to the near North Side of Chicago, which is the swinging place for singles. Stewardess, that was a dirty name. In a big city, it’s an easy woman. I didn’t like this at all. All these books—
Coffee, Tea and Me.

I lived in an apartment complex where the majority there were stewardesses.
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The other women were secretaries and teachers. They would go to our parties and they would end up being among the worst. They never had stories about these secretaries and nurses, but they sure had good ones about stewardesses.

I meet a lot of other wives or single women. The first minute they start talking to me, they’re really cold. They think the majority of stewardesses are snobs or they may be jealous. These women think we have a great time, that we are playgirls, that we have the advantage to go out with every type of man we want. So when they first meet us, they really turn off on us.

When you first start flying, the majority of girls do live in apartment complexes by the airport. The men they meet are airport employees: ramp rats, cleaning airplanes and things like that, mechanics, and young pilots, not married, ones just coming in fresh.

After a year we get tired of that, so we move into the city to get involved with men that are usually young executives, like at Xerox or something. Young businessmen in the early thirties and late twenties, they really think stewardesses are the gals to go out with if they went to get so far. They wear their hats and their suits and in the winter their black gloves. The women are getting older, they’re getting twenty-four, twenty-five. They get involved with bartenders too. Stewardesses and bartenders are a pair. (Laughs.)