My First Real Boss 

My first boss was my mother. She had me working at 6 or 7 years old. But I’m sure I’ll be talking about her in more depth another time.

My first real boss?

I’m not sure. I got a job at the Rockville Centre Car Wash when I was 12. That was the youngest age at the time for employment. I remember I had to fill out a form certifying that I was 12. Thinking back on that now, it seems rather young to be doing the work I was doing. I was a weekend employee and my job was cleaning the interiors of the cars as they rolled out of the automated car wash. The work took no mental skill, but significant physical and mental endurance. When a car emerged from the wash, dripping wet, two or three of my colleagues would go to work wiping down the exterior and wheels with rags, while I hopped inside, emptied the ashtrays, wiped down the dashboard, washed and dried the windows, and vacuumed the floor.

When volume was slow, I could do my work at a comfortable pace. But when the volume was high – and it was high for at least six hours of the eight-hour shift – I was in a state of frantic rushing. Cars would emerge from the wash every 90 seconds. (I know that because there was a stretch, towards the end of my career there, when I looked up at the clock every time I got out of the car.) It was boring work, but it was a real job. I punched a time clock, got a half-hour off for lunch, and made $1.25 an hour.

I don’t remember the name of my boss. I remember what he looked like: short, stout, and balding. He wore a suit and tie, even on hot days, and always had a big cigar hanging from his lips. He didn’t do any work that I could see. He mostly chatted with the customers and occasionally, when one of them would complain about something that wasn’t dried or cleaned properly, he would berate the offending worker in front of everyone.

Other than the public scolding, he didn’t do anything I can remember that was offensive. He paid us on time. He gave us our time off for lunch. And he didn’t cheat us on our hours. Still, we saw him as a fat little cigar-chomping prick. And that’s how we referred to him when we talked about work. We disliked everything about him – from the tone of his voice to the way he walked, like a penguin. Even if he had been better about how he corrected problems, we would have still despised him.

There was a sort of seniority to the jobs one would do there. The top spot was the guy that put the car into the automated washer. This was the top position because it involved interacting with the customers. A customer would drive his car up to a certain point, put it in park, and he would open the door for them, hop in, and steer the car into the mechanism that gripped the front tires and guided the car through. He was tall and handsome – I remember that – and garrulous. And he was always smiling. The customers liked him and he seemed to like them.

Next in the hierarchy was the guy that pressure cleaned the tires. He was a short wiry man that flew around the cars like a bee, moving here and there erratically, spraying the tires and hubcaps expertly with the nozzle, and occasionally getting down on his knees with a rag and solvent to take care of some particularly difficult stain.

Next were the three men that dried the outside of the car, of which only one was allowed to drive it out of the wash.

And, finally… me. The person that cleaned the cars’ interiors.

During the time I worked there, all of the employees were African-American-mostly in their 20s and 30s. My job was always done by a Caucasian man-child,  one who was smallish in stature, athletic, and presumably agile enough to move quickly through his chores without any problem. In retrospect, I’m guessing that was the idea of my boss, who probably felt the customers would worry less about having a dark-skinned boy hopping around the inside of their vehicles.

I can say for certain that I never learned anything from that fat little cigar-chomping guy, except that he probably had no idea how much we despised him. I have kept that in mind as an adult. I try to treat my employees with respect, but I don’t try to win their affection. I knew, from this first job at age 12, that the divide between boss and employee is a wide one.

Some say that old-fashioned, objective journalism no longer exists – that major media have abandoned their longstanding commitment to restricting their social, political, and personal views to the editorial pages.

Could this be true?

Here is a sampling of headlines from The Washington Post’s digital newsletter earlier this week:

* Trump to flee Washington and seek rehabilitation in a MAGA oasis: Florida

* Undeterred, Biden will push unity in a capital locked down after an insurrection

* How Twitter, on the front lines of history, finally decided to ban Trump

* Joe Biden has already shown us that governing is back

* As Trump exits Washington, he tells the modest crowd, “We’ll be back in some form.”

* Trump ends it all with one final scam

Are these headlines factual? Are they unbiased? You decide.

The Migrants Are Coming! The Migrants Are Coming!

While watching the inauguration, my brother-in-law said, “Biden wasn’t even in office yet and the Trumpsters were already starting their conspiracy theories about Latino caravans marching towards our southern border.”

He’s generally much more up-to-date on this sort of thing than I am, so I didn’t challenge him. But I did think to myself: Why wouldn’t caravans be forming? If I lived in Central America and wanted a better life for my family, I’d be on my way. (I subscribe to the theory that economics is a key factor in human behavior, and people generally respond to economic incentives and disincentives in predictable ways. In much of academia today, this is a very unpopular idea.)

I asked Amaru to check it out, and I was right. Instead of conspiracies theories, he found more than 20 stories – from sources including NBC News, Fox News, BBC News, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and NPR – verifying that thousands of migrants from Honduras and Guatemala were already on the move, hoping to take advantage of the new administration’s plans for immigration reform.

Everything Isn’t Always About You, Betsy! 

January 17, 1983

Dear Betsy;

You are sensitive to your own feelings; you indulge yourself in feelings which are always and exhaustingly about your reactions to people and events. You haven’t the faintest idea about other people’s feelings – how you affect them. You invent complications, you analyse without reason or need very simple occurrences, and you analyse with very little true knowledge of people. It does not occur to you that this is an outrageous burden on others; not friendship but emotional tyranny.

Emotional tyranny, Betsy. The rule, your rule, is: tread softly, by God, or you will disturb my feelings. It’s an enormous stupid tedious bore. You can have all the feelings you want, but the only practical way you can handle this is: cut out the people who distress your feelings and take the rest of the world at face value, the face the world presents, because everyone has enough real problems without getting bogged down in the problems you manufacture.

You have no idea why I won’t travel with you again. Because, with all your feelings, you have never stopped to look at yourself: a woman who sulks when events don’t work out as desired, who has innumerable absolute needs which are not life and death matters but your absolutes, who has to be kept happy or else by golly it’s miseryville all round.

Friendship is fun and a loose mutual aid society. It isn’t soul-picking (your soul, note) and you’ve made me as furious as I’ve ever been. I won’t have this nonsense and this tyranny. I have never had it from anyone else and I’m not having it any more from you. Try growing up.

Love,

M