The Greatest Invention of My Lifetime, cont.

As reported in last week’s blog post, my life has been defined by a discernible lack of manual dexterity.  This shortcoming surfaced during my early education and followed me into my brief stint of public service.

During my twenties, my life goals changed and I completed a bachelor’s degree at the School of Business, San Diego State University.  Appropriately, I began the search for profitable employment.  This search began in 1981, the depth of the Carter Recession.  If you think things are dismal on the economic scene now, you should have been around then.  It took me, the holder of the most marketable degree among job seekers (of that era) ten months to find a job.

I was still relying on the trusty old Royal manual typewriter that my dad had acquired for me during my high-school days.  I had composed curriculum vitae of suitable style and purchased the services of a local office supply store to print several hundred copies, incrementally over time, to be used in my search.  Each Sunday, accompanied by my wife of the time, I would travel to my parents’ home for dinner. While the rest of the family socialized in the living room I would spend the afternoon, and sometimes late into the evening, composing individualized letters of introduction to accompany my résumé being submitted to prospective employers. Thankfully, by that time the miracle “correction tape” had been invented. While it was no indemnity against mistakes, it certainly improved the review and repair process. I cannot recollect the exact number of documents I prepared during this effort.  But I am sure I used enough watermark bond to send some logger’s children to college; probably to become a tree-hugging environmental biologist.

I eventually succeeded in securing employment with The Automobile Club of Southern California, an affiliate of AAA.  For those unfamiliar with this not-for-profit behemoth, it is a member owned motorists’ association that among other services (you’ve seen the maps, you’ve seen the tow-trucks) provides automobile insurance. I was assigned to their General Accounting Department in downtown Los Angeles.  It is a great organization.  They were a bit behind the times technologically speaking.  For the entire department, comprised of staff of perhaps thirty including managers, supervisors, clerks and professionals (that was me and my co-workers) there was one computer terminal.  It was used exclusively for information inquiries.  All data input was accomplished by submitting hand written coding sheets that were transported to the processing center in Orange County.  Two days later, the accountant responsible for creating the entries would receive the original documents and a computer printout that reported the data entered.  The accountant would then review the data for accuracy and advise the data processing staff that the effort was successful, or heaven forbid, of any errors that needed correction. It is interesting to note that the use of computerized business information technology was pioneered by the insurance industry.  We were not of pioneer stock.

This association lasted for just under two years until I could market myself for supervisory positions.  Another couple of years with a developer of computer operating systems prepared me for real management responsibility.  I landed at Brock Homes (eventually absorbed by The Ryland Group) and began to build a foundation for success.  Now with management responsibility, I found I needed to occasionally communicate in writing with persons outside of the company via that miracle of information dissemination, the letter.  Upon such occasions, I would use the typewriter provided for the accounts payable clerks use on the rare occasion they needed to issue a check between computerized check runs.  It was just sitting there most of the time.

On one occasion I was discovered by the Controller (my boss) laboring over a letter I was composing to some taxing agency.  She recommended that I hand write the letter and have one of the department secretaries produce the typed product.

“But I compose better at a keyboard than when writing long-hand.” I protested.  She determined that my preference did not outweigh the need to demonstrate proper professional decorum and thus I was banned from using the typewriter.  After all, this was the same woman, who in the presence of the entire clerical staff announced that it was not necessary for me to assist with the keying of journal entries during the crunch of month end.  It was beneath my station. I hated that woman!

After five years of indentured servitude (after all, they paid well) I recognized that I was never going to be promoted beyond my station of General Accounting Manager, when they told me I was never going to be promoted beyond General Accounting Manager.  It had something to do with Ryland being a CPA shop and I was not a CPA. I left Brock, Los Angeles and a stalled career to return to San Diego.

This occurred in 1991 in; you guessed it, the middle of the George H.W. Bush recession.  It took me about eight months to find a job.  During this time I used a Brother word processor that my Dad had acquired at some garage sale.  It looked a lot like a typewriter but had a small electronic screen at the top of the keyboard that would report the information you typed into memory.  Once entered, you could recall from memory the typed document and the machine would recreate it on paper.  This was a great step forward in the process of writing the individualized letters of transmittal that accompanied my résumés as only the address particulars had to be typed in for each.

Eventually I landed the job at Shea Homes for which I am famous. To summarize, my career there took off when I was given the opportunity to write the San Diego Division business plan for 1995. By this time, use of the desktop PC had bloomed in the business world.  One could see in real time which keystrokes were successful and which had gone awry. In addition, the era of desktop publishing had dawned allowing the ambitious author to monitor form as well as content.  Facilities for inserting photos and graphs and charts and tables were added to the suite of word processing software capabilities. It was an accountant’s dream; words and numbers!  It was one of the most challenging and rewarding assignments I ever undertook and it led to my eventual advancement into executive management. 

In the years since, tools have been added without which I would not be able to dazzle my reading audience today.  Not only have we sophists experienced the benefits of spell check, but built in artificial intelligence has given us the best of grammar, usage, diction and syntax.  Those of you who know me well will not be shocked but for those of you new to my communications, I don’t really talk this way.  I wave my hands over the magic keyboard and the jumble of thoughts is marked with red, green and blue underscoring, each offering admirable suggestions that make my prose seem elegant.

Readers, I cannot deny credit where it is due.  I offer homage to the greatest invention of my lifetime, the word processor!  Huzzah!