Where The Hell Is Michael?

I was 25 and working for Chevron at their San Francisco headquarters. Since I really had no skills other than knowing how to count and most of my alphabet, I was working in that truly highly skilled area of file clerkery.

Hey, I was supporting two babies with my efforts so don't judge! I am pleased to let you know that although I didn't begin college until I was 30, I did do college and later worked as an executive assistant to the president of a fairly large firm, and later as director of Marketing for a couple of other companies.

When I was at Chevron, I had several close friends including a guy named Michael Hunt. Michael was a FINE big handsome black man who worked in Engineering where I was assigned. Michael, John, Randy, and Steve were my good guy buddies at the time. They were all engineers and pretty cool dudes. None of them was a romantic interest (on their side or mine) and I think all of them were married.

Some of the offices I went into had higher level executives. These guys were known to me as Mr. Whatever their name was. Fine. I know they all thought I was cute (okay, I was cute) but also they thought that I was fairly stupid or I wouldn't be working as a file clerk.

Every day, one of my Mr. Executive guys would ask me to go see if anybody knew where Mike was. They would point me in the direction of one of the other Mr. Executive's offices to check. So I would go into the big shots office and say "Hi Mr. So-And-So! Have you seen Mike Hunt?" The guy would snicker and say something stupid like, "No but I would like to."

In any case, this went on every day for a couple of weeks. Finally, one of my buddies was in the office with the big shot when I came in to try and find the elusive Mr. Hunt. Later that day, my buddy took me aside and explained the little joke that was on me. Bastards!

Okay, maybe I was kind of stupid, but give me a break. That was low.

When I hear people carry on about the "good old days" I remember things like this and think "oh, were they really?" One dog of a man used to make humping motions over me when I bent over a file drawer to amuse the other men in the office. This guy's name was Al Diaz and no, the name has not been changed to protect the innocent, because Al was not innocent.

When I complained to a supervisor, I was advised to have a sense of humor about these things. Uh huh. I'm a girl with a good sense of humor and a very appreciative attitude that the good old days are fucking over!