Ma Bell: Ding Dong Belle and Bessie

Belle

Belle.  Clearly, her mom and dad must have named her Belle because of the Southern Belle old time beauty ideals.  And she probably was stunning if you scraped 30 layers of makeup off of her face.  She had that thick pancake makeup look.  She wore false eyelashes that looked like butterflies on her eyelids.  They mesmerized me.  She could almost hypnotize me with them.  Blink, blink, nod.  Her hair was leftover from the era of Laugh-In, if you know what that was.  It was teased high on her head and then smoothed into what they used to call French Curls.  She looked a lot like JoAnne Worley from Laugh-In.

She was married and had no kids.  On her desk was a very expensive oil portrait from Olan Mills. The top photographer in Dallas.  The portrait was of her dog.  Really.  Having gone through a bad marriage, I guess would rather have a picture of a dog on my desk in preference to my husband.  It was a cute dog, one of those little yapping kinds of dogs, not big enough to expel an actual bark.

Belle was very slow.  She walked slow, talked slow, and worked slow.  She even smoked slowly.  She would purse her lips and barely blow the smoke out.  It probably took a full minute to get it all out.  The only time she moved from her desk was to go to breaks, lunch, and a potty break.  Her posterior was glued to her seat by choice.

I didn’t talk to her much.  She was pretty superficial.  And every time she did talk to me, I felt like my head was nodding in time with her eyelashes.  I wondered how heavy they felt?  They looked awful heavy; in fact, they made her eyes a little droopy.

Belle was somewhere in her forties, on the far side of forty.  She was “one of them.”  She was in the group with Plain Jane, Late Faye, and Monster Peggy.  Everything that happened in that office went through all four of them and one other person.  Even the confidential things that a supervisor should keep to herself were shared.  I never believed and still don’t, that it is wise to promote a person within a workplace and supervise their friends.  They hesitate to discipline them, and they tell them everything.  This office was a perfect example of that.

I didn’t interact much with Belle.  She sat on the other side of the room next to Monster Peggy.  My friend Mary was stuck on that side of the room by them.  But she had been there a while, and they were no match for her.  Her wit and her tongue never failed to win every time they tried to get in her business.

It was always tense in the office.  Too many women working together.  Too many divisions in age and personalities.  The old girls just didn’t believe that they had to compromise in any way to make the working environment decent.

The other person in the privileged group was named Bessie.  She was in her early sixties, petite, and she was the manager’s secretary.  She had all of the secret information that she was supposed to keep confidential.  But she didn’t.  She shared it with her gang.  She’s the first person that I saw on my first day, the person that wasn’t friendly at all.

Those women are the reason that I vowed that I would never act like a nosey old beyotch when I got older.  I thank them for showing me how obnoxious some older folks can be in a work environment.  I resented them very much.  I just couldn’t understand why they would do everything possible to create tension in the office.  Actually, what they wanted to do was make it a miserable place to work so they could run off the young people and minorities and replace them with people like them.  But heck, I don’t think that was possible.  The mold had been broken.

It was upsetting to them because the phone company had been in a lot of trouble recently for not hiring minorities, not promoting certain groups of people, and not allowing women to work in what had traditionally been a man’s job and vice versa.  They had been in big trouble with the federal government, and now they were being punished.  Now there were strict quotas that had to be maintained.  There were minorities and women and men in jobs they could have never been placed in before.  And that upset the wonderful world of my office when that happened.  And bad enough that they had to deal with minorities, there was actually one man in our office.  Whoever heard of that?

All we wanted to do was go to work every day and do our job.  All of the resentment and pettiness made every day long and stressful.  We had to stick together to survive the clique.  Fortunately, we all had a good sense of humor and found ways to make it through every day, and that is what saved us.

No matter how much I hated it, I just had to deal with it.  In a few days, when we got paid, I would have enough money to move.  And that was a perfect thing.