5 Things the Typing Pool Battle Axes Taught Me About Working With Editors
It’s about the work — not you
When I first started business writing over thirty years ago, it was incidental to my clerk job. Most managers didn’t have computers on their desks, so there was always typing to do. There was still a need for a typing pool, but those sexist dens had been closed down by the time I hit the workforce in the late ‘80s. The women who’d once filled them were still around doing different things, so the shittiest typing jobs fell to the newbies, like me.
Those jobs were invariably for the dinosaurs who couldn’t write legibly. The men who couldn’t give two shits what anyone thought and would get pissed off if you asked them what they’d written.
Boy, those were the days!
Despite their foul dispositions, I got some attention for my writing style, even though I didn’t know what I was doing. Back then, managers would draft a rough outline and expect us to fill in the rest. Some of the typing pool women could do that without giving it a second thought. Had they been born thirty years later, many of them would have been running those offices instead of carrying them.
I was not bad at finishing letters, and it wasn’t long before I, like so many young people, thought there was nothing…
