Ma Bell: Minor Details

500 S Ervay

Now that the stalker was under control, I felt a lot better.  And I had an ace in the hole by the cops knowing about him.  I knew he would leave me alone now.  Creep.

It seems I have forgotten to describe the office decor.  If you had ever seen some of the government offices in DC, you would have thought you had been transported back there.  I'm sure that the unknowing public pictures fine furnishings and matching decor in all of those offices.  I'm sure that some offices are nicely furnished, but most are not.  Not then anyway.

Our desks looked like Navy surplus desks; they were gray, clunky, metal eyesores with some kind of a semi-hard thick gray mat on them.  The file cabinets were gray, the walls were gray. Most of the people in the office were gray.  It was gray hell.  The floors were dirty gray and discolored beige that looked yellow, linoleum.  And the building was ancient.  There were dips in the floors, the hallways had dirty, old looking carpet.  It was all depressingly old and kind of smelly like a very old person's home.  It wasn't an enjoyable looking place to spend 8 hours a day.  It had seen better times, but they were long before I got there.

Our office's only redeeming feature was the windows that went across the entire wall of the back room where we worked.  If you stood up, you could see people on the sidewalks and cars going by.  It was a glimmer of color.  Mary and I worked in the backroom one day, and I looked down, and the sidewalk was filled with people standing around.  I asked Mary to look down there.  She laughed at me and said she didn't need to look.  The building had received a bomb threat.  I asked her how she knew.  She said the threats were always made to the government offices below us.  I asked her why we were not down there.  She said Ma Bell didn't allow us to participate because the threats were frequent.  It was nice to know that they cared about us so little.  Tote that barge and lift that bale.

The good part of working at that address was an eating establishment called The Deluxe Diner.  It was about 2 blocks down from us.  Delicious southern style food, low prices.  On payday,  I would treat myself to a real lunch, and their fried chicken was right up my alley.  But I would never walk there by myself.  There was an enormous hole in the ground where The Dallas Public Library was being built and one more across the street from us where the new City Hall was being built.
So you know what that meant, right?  Construction workers.  I called them animals.  There were maybe a hundred of them working, and the sidewalks were partially blocked by wooden fences hiding the construction areas.  But they had plenty of places where they had openings so the guys could enjoy the females walking by.  I refused to walk by them by myself.  I hated them.

So Mary and I would endure the wolf whistles and the "hey Baby" and all of the other things they said to go pick up our food.  We called our order ahead of time so that we didn't have to be there longer than we needed to be.  And guess what?  They had a lunch counter, so the place was jammed full of construction workers.  As soon as we would walk in, you could hear a pin drop.  They stopped eating.  All eyes were on us.  I hated it.  And then, when you were almost to the door to leave, they would start saying things.  It was a lot to go through for fried chicken.  And that was in the winter.  In the summer, we all wore less clothing, so they had more to look at.  And the more they could see, the louder they were.

My first experience with salsa was that winter.  I had a terrible cold, a sore throat could barely talk.  Mary said she was taking me to a Mexican restaurant downtown.  Ma Bell didn't have a regular sick leave policy like most companies did.  You had to work five years before you got paid for the first day of sickness.  Until that point,  you missed 2 days of pay, and they would start paying sick pay on the third day.  I couldn't afford that.  I had to work no matter how sick I was.  And I was pretty sick.  So Mary ordered enchiladas, and they brought salsa and chips.  I had never eaten that before.  She told me to eat it, so I did.  My throat was so raw that it burned like fire.  But it opened my nose up where I could breathe, and after the initial fire in my throat, I stopped coughing and didn't cough anymore.  After we got back to work, my throat stopped hurting.  It was a Mexican food miracle.  I felt 100 times better than I did before I ate.  That was my savior whenever I had a bad cold—hot salsa.  I still use it as my go-to remedy.

Sometimes, during the cold weather, I would park my car at the Park and Ride and ride the bus downtown to work.  Since my car heater didn't work, it was hard to keep the frost off of my windshield.  I would go out and scrape it off at 6 am, and it would re-freeze on the way to work.  I would bundle my kids up and drop them off, and then I would go to the Park and Ride.  It was fine using it in the morning, but the bus stop was a zoo in the afternoon.  It was, I guess, one of the major stops in downtown Dallas.  Hordes of people would be waiting for buses up and down the street.  That was bad enough, but then you had to deal with the Street Preachers, whom I found extremely distasteful and embarrassing, and the Hari Krishnas would also go jingling by looking for money.  I could take the Krishnas but not the screaming street preacher peddling his religion on a major downtown street for money in his cup.  Metro religion, how funny.  I would be glad when it got warmer, so I didn't have to stand there and listen to him, screaming.

I was getting used to some of the weirdness of downtown Dallas.  Dallas was just a complete culture shock for me, but I was trying to get used to it.  Sometimes I would get very homesick for DC and wanted to go back.  It was an overwhelming urge that I had to control.  I missed things that were and friends who might still be there.  I thought about my old boyfriend, David.  I had never forgotten him, and I always wondered where he was and what he was doing. I hoped that he was happy wherever he was.  I thought about Shelley and wondered if she had married. I thought about Judy and her little girl and hoped that they were well.  I wondered if I would ever see any of them again.  And then reality would smack me in the face.

 I still had to do something about Mike.  I was almost ready.  Boy, was he going to be surprised?  He thought he was going to walk away and be Mr. Playboy.  Well, he was wrong about that.  Payback, as they say, is hell.