Old Day Jobs: School Publishing

January 1998. It had been about a month since I'd quit my job at the P.R. firm and I needed the work. Adecco had gotten me some temp work at a school publishing company, which paved the way toward a full-time position. An assistant position, working for the marketing managers of the Science and Technology books.

It was a big deal for me at the time. The managers I was working with were the nicest folks. The full-time position would mean more money and actual health benefits. Better yet, they knew I was a writer and were wholly supportive of me pursuing it on the side.

I wanted the job. But it was a few weeks before I would know whether I was going to get it. Those were some trying weeks. I was still burning from my bad experience at the P.R. firm. I needed some financial security. There was another job I applied to at the time, as the personal assistant to a cosmetics executive—but I'd have to work out of this woman's apartment and the pay was low and the benefits nil.

If I didn't get the job at McGraw-Hill, I was either going to move out to L.A. and join all the other frustrated dreamers trying to break into the movie business... or I was going to join the army. Either way, I was ready to jump out of a plane.

ooOoo

After I quit the marketing department at McGraw-Hill, I'd hoped to put the company behind me. My exit wasn't a showstopper like in the P.R. firm, but it was ugly all the same. The department was filled with retired schoolteachers and bitter housewives—and they'd cultivated a suffocating, oppressive environment. My unhappiness there had been building for a while, and I was glad to be out...

Alas, a month with no work left me desperate to take the first temp assignment that Adecco offered me:

Right back at McGraw-Hill. Two floors lower. In the "electronic design prepub" (EDP) department.

McGraw-Hill was the only place I worked where I quit twice.

The first time, it was after about a year of working as an assistant in the marketing department.

The second time, it was after about a year of working as an assistant in EDP.

I would have been content to work in either department indefinitely, were it not for some fucking awful managers I had to work with.

Both positions started well, but grew distorted and unbearable with time. This happens when you treat adults like children.

A trollish old woman I had to work with in the marketing department, by the name of Veronica Senior-Newell, once asked me what I studied in college.

"Screenwriting," I told her, matter-of-factly. "I'm going to write for the movies."

"Yeah, sure you are," she scoffed. This unpleasant grotesque who probably just barely finished high school, with her awful stench of cheap perfume married with a ripe body odor.

Oh, how I wanted her dead.

When I quit McGraw-Hill for the second time, I had lined up employment at another temp agency altogether, called "TNG Temps"...

They promised me a much higher pay-rate than Adecco. Working at investment banking firms...