They say we change our careers five to seven times in our lifetime. I believe it.
My big plan in the early 1970's was to go to university and become a psychologist. I loved listening to other people's problems and even wrote a Dear Abbey-like column for one school newspaper edition. I loved to give advice and try to fix broken hearts or make things better in general. You know what it's like to be on top of the world, finished highschool, bullet proof, knowing-it-all....but not having a clue that really, you know nothing. I graduated from highschool - left the wide open spaces of the country and moved to the city. Despite all the fantastic shopping and restaurants, I found myself in a small apartment on the 3rd floor of a building with no elevator. There was a small balcony overlooking a couple of paved parking lots, but nothing much green. There was the odd spindly tree barely surviving here and there, with a little Clark Gable fringe of a moustache lawn peeking through between the sidewalk cracks. I was definitely in a concrete jungle but without the vines or foilage. Imagine, as a farm kid, I had my own forest across the road and an open field at my back door. Our farm yard had a long lane lined with evergreen trees that was in clear view of the house's picture window. The lane was one of the best parts of the whole yard because we flew up and down it and out onto the dirt road every single day on bikes, horses, or ski-doos and all the while smelling that beautiful, fresh, crisp country air. I had spent the summer that year working at the regional park and spent all my time outside painting, cleaning, picking up garbage, and taking tickets. I love the outdoors.
In the city, there was no room for my bike and I had no car, so I was grounded unless I walked or took the bus. The bus was okay except for the smell of exhaust fumes that nearly finished me off. I had a headache pretty well every days as a result. I had never even been to Saskatoon before. Buying groceries was probably the worst. Juggling several full bags of heavy things like canned goods and milk got to be a drag. Getting to the bus stop loaded down, waiting, riding the bus and walking from the bus stop to the apartment, then climbing three flights of stairs was murder. The building had one temperature hot, hot, and hotter, so my room mate and I sweltered, especially in the winter. That late Fall on Grey Cup Sunday, it was bitterly cold outside, but we were trying to cool off with our patio door opened a crack...well, maybe a little more than that. What happened no one intended, but the water in the radiator pipe running under the window froze and burst. Water flooded everywhere on our lovely red carpet. The flood was bad enough but the rich landlord's girlfriend came to investigate and she was pretty irate. It was not a hallmark night. Seems to me I was cooking chili in the apartment next door, drinking beer, smoking, and losing my sense of taste or something because every time I popped back into check and stir the chili, I thought it needed a little more chili powder. If memory serves me, the chili was not the hit I thought it would be.
Classes in the College of Arts at university were in huge lecture theatres that housed two or three hundred students. No one cared if you were there or not and they certainly didn't mark attendance. In fact, they were hoping to weed you out that first year. I began to find it easier to sleep through my morning classes and just attend the afternoon ones. Taxis and hitch-hiking became a much preferred method of transport, but my pocket book began to suffer. My social life remained viable because a whole pile of friends from back home had also moved into the city to either work or go to school. We had fun. I passed that first year with low marks and one fail in French. My Hudson Bay highschool French was no match for an all French class, i.e. no English allowed. I still don't know what the required reading, "Le Petit Prince" was really about. I remember giving a recap of the story to the prof, in French and him just shaking his head. The only reason I took French was because I heard how boring the English class was. Highschool in the early 1970's in rural Saskatchewan had no guidance counsellors...even if there had been though, I probably wouldn't have listened to any advice, because I knew it all.
As you can imagine, that first year of university was a disappointment for me. I learned to like the city by then, found the Biology museum and visited the Forestry Farm zoo and other interesting places like the Mendel Art Gallery often. We took long walks along the river bank and walked across the bridges to downtown. We got picked up by a cop once for jaywalking. We pled ignorance which was no defence, but it worked, because as we explained, where we came from everybody did it. The riverbank was not as developed as it is today, but the Broadway area was unique and the University, Broadway and Victoria bridges were as beautiful as they are today. They held an ominous element though, because every so often somebody would jump off one and that would make everyone stand up and take notice that life wasn't always wonderful for everyone. Two bars downtown were popular student hangouts - Jack's and Yip's. The Sportsman Bar on 8th Street was another place we frequented. For some reason, I drank my first and only zombie ever in that bar and wound up in the emergency ward because I was developing a kidney infection at the same time! As you can imagine, I learned early on to curb my alcohol intake because I generally got violently ill. Other than the social life, I didn't take to the university scene that first year, and by April, which was the end of it, I had searched my soul and that of my parents, and we all opted for me to go to business college. Mom and Dad were supportive, they just wanted me to find some way to support myself and I agreed.
I whizzed through a legal secretarial course and got honours. I loved it and my first job was in a fairly big law office in Saskatoon. We worked on real estate transactions, wills, criminal and divorce cases. Overall, it was a good learning experience. I had sewn several outfits to wear for my new career and I remember wearing a green polka dot skirt and top to my first interview where the male boss hired me on the spot. Being naive, I attributed my good luck to my fledgling sewing abilites. By a stroke of good luck the finished products had turned out really well. (I still had not heard the wisecracks about 'sexetaries' and really didn't hear about them until a long while later). Those were the days of the miniskirt. The lawyer I was assigned to had a wonderful sense of humour and he went on to build a great reputation in his career. He even became somewhat of a staple on the evening television news, at the very least a familiar face. I only stayed at that law office for about a year because I got engaged and was moving back home to be with my fiancee. and make plans for our wedding. Right about that time, I was taken out for lunch by an old friend from home who was a lawyer in another Saskatoon office. He was someone that was older than me and was heavily involved in youth politics. We went to some of the same events. His mother knew my mother. He was asking me if I would go to work for him, but I declined in favor of moving away to be with my boyfriend. Think of how things might look today if my life had gone down that path!
Back in Hudson Bay, I boarded with some old family friends until the wedding, Alex and Beatrice. She was a fabulous cook! My soon-to-be husband was renting a house with a couple of friends. We would buy that house for $9,000.00, if you can imagine it. Thank goodness my dad was a generous man and could loan us the money. We were able to pay him back when we sold it and doubled our money! We were ecstatic...and it was 1975. I found a job as a clerical person in a bank and that was fun too. I knew everyone there and almost all the customers. In that town, the people working in the forestry industry were making really big money and it was exciting to see them come in. I was good at doing the secretarial work, but when it came to helping out with the banking stuff, I really should have kept to what I knew. I got a kick out of watching the different people come in to access their safety deposit boxes. I remember one elderly bachelor who had a real ritual with some numbers he had written down and was very secretive about everything. I always wondered what he was up to, but of course that was strictly private and confidential. I had gone from making about $300.00 per month in the law office to doubling it at the bank. I was making over $600.00 per month! All my bosses up to this point were males.
We got married and within a few months the entrepreneurial spirit hit so my husband and I bought a flower shop. It was in the same town as my parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and a whole pile of other relatives, so things were exciting. While in the flower shop, I also worked a maternity leave position part-time for the legal aide office and that was superbly interesting. The criminal cases and the messy divorces were the best. I was surrounded by some of the best co-workers you could ever find. We worked hard and laughed hard. One of the young lawyers rented the suite above our flower shop so we got to know him quite well. Although he eventually moved on and we did too, we were saddened to hear a few years later that he had drowned in his bathtub. Unfortunately, he had a condition that caused seizures. Rest in peace Gabe Burkhart.
It was never my intention to try to pretend that I had a flare for floral designing. I didn't. I knew nothing about it really. My plan was to continue with my career as a legal secretary. As it turned out, the workload in the flower shop was unbelievable and even though my job was to do books, I soon became the clerk, delivery person, flower picker upper, jack-of-all-trades and oh my goodness....floral designer. Not often, but when we were absolutely swamped and desperate on certain days like Mother's Day or Valentines or Christmas, I would step in to help with designing. I normally kept to simple, low key things like corsages, wreaths, or sprays but soon I graduated to casket pieces and arrangements. It was ironic that me, the fake designer could put almost anythng into the display fridge on those days and have it bought up from under my nose by these frantic last minute shopping men who waited for the midnight hour to pick something up for their women. It was fun, it was exhilarating and it was plenty of laughs. For awhile we stocked these little fat kitchen witches and I loved them. I was excitedly talking about them one day to a customer, saying, how did she get so fat with that little wee mouth?...and she suddenly said, "I'll take one!" I started laughing, because of all things, I certainly never thought of myself as a high pressure salesperson, and it appeared that I had just been one! In fact, I remember saying to her, "oh no, you don't have to", but it was too late, she wanted one.
During the five years we had the flower shop, I went through two pregnancies and gave birth to two babies. Then we moved back to Hudson Bay for my husband to return to his former job, and I travelled back to Melfort for a week every month to do the flower shop books. After a short time though, my husband became one of the casualties to a massive lay off at his workplace. To make ends meet, I went to work full time at a government office for tourism and renewable resources. That was my best job ever. We were four women out of an entire staff of men. Men are generally great to work with and far better than working with women. Men never sit around complaining or whining about what's wrong like women do. They either hang their heads and grumble or just laugh everything off. They make fun of each other and call each other nicknames like bullet head or godzilla. They treated all of us women like beauty queens whether we were or not. They were notorious flirts and took every opportunity to try to come onto any of us. One guy admitted to me that he didn't care what the woman looked like because he could always put a paper bag over her head! Turkey! All in all, I have very fond memories of that place and those guys. They were just what I needed. I lost weight, I started to fit into clothes I hadn't worn in a couple of years. I was married and they knew it. I was loyal to my husband and they knew it, but that made it all the more memorable.
Next my husband got a call from a former co-worker to accept a job in Saskatoon, so off we moved. I stayed home with the kids over the summer, but come Fall, 1983, I started looking for work and found it as a clerical person at a post-secondary institution. I worked for several areas, facilities, the vice principal of programs, human resources and the bookstore. I went part-time after about a year and then started taking night classes towards nursing. By 1987, I enrolled in nursing full time and kept working part-time at the same facility. We moved to Prince Albert in 1988 and I finished my training as a diploma nurse in 1989. My kids were in elementary school by this time and we had bought a trampoline. Super Channel was a new thing and computer games were really catching on. Mario Bros. is one I can remember the kids playing.
I went to work casual for the Holy Family Hospital and for the Victorian Order of Nurses. I worked on two floors - maternity and nursery, and medicine/palliative care. I did a variety of things with the VON such as worked at the health centres at Weyerhaeuser and Woodland Campus. I also participated in mass immunizations at places like the Correctional Centre and the Fire Hall. Now suddenly, all my bosses were women.
By 1990, the VON negotiated a contract with Woodland Campus to provide a health nurse, and I was it. That job lasted eight years and I thoroughly enjoyed it. By 1998, I left for a year to perform a temporary nurse manager position at Herb Bassett Nursing Home. When I returned, I became an instructor for the Home Care/Special Care Aide program. By 2004, I had obtained my Bachelor of Science in Nursing and moved to Melfort to take a management position at a nursing home there. After two years, I was ready to move back to Saskatoon and be near my kids. By this time, they were married and contemplating having babies of their own. I took another management position for a year again in a nursing home and was enticed back to post-secondary education by an ad in the paper.
It is now five years since I began as program head for the Practical Nursing program. We are wondering how to celebrate this landmark year. A condition of the job was to obtain a master's degree and I did so in 2010. That same year, just to be on the safe side, I also did the training to be a real estate agent, but that's for after I retire. Retirement?? That won't be for at least eight years and probably more if the government gets its way!
My big plan in the early 1970's was to go to university and become a psychologist. I loved listening to other people's problems and even wrote a Dear Abbey-like column for one school newspaper edition. I loved to give advice and try to fix broken hearts or make things better in general. You know what it's like to be on top of the world, finished highschool, bullet proof, knowing-it-all....but not having a clue that really, you know nothing. I graduated from highschool - left the wide open spaces of the country and moved to the city. Despite all the fantastic shopping and restaurants, I found myself in a small apartment on the 3rd floor of a building with no elevator. There was a small balcony overlooking a couple of paved parking lots, but nothing much green. There was the odd spindly tree barely surviving here and there, with a little Clark Gable fringe of a moustache lawn peeking through between the sidewalk cracks. I was definitely in a concrete jungle but without the vines or foilage. Imagine, as a farm kid, I had my own forest across the road and an open field at my back door. Our farm yard had a long lane lined with evergreen trees that was in clear view of the house's picture window. The lane was one of the best parts of the whole yard because we flew up and down it and out onto the dirt road every single day on bikes, horses, or ski-doos and all the while smelling that beautiful, fresh, crisp country air. I had spent the summer that year working at the regional park and spent all my time outside painting, cleaning, picking up garbage, and taking tickets. I love the outdoors.
In the city, there was no room for my bike and I had no car, so I was grounded unless I walked or took the bus. The bus was okay except for the smell of exhaust fumes that nearly finished me off. I had a headache pretty well every days as a result. I had never even been to Saskatoon before. Buying groceries was probably the worst. Juggling several full bags of heavy things like canned goods and milk got to be a drag. Getting to the bus stop loaded down, waiting, riding the bus and walking from the bus stop to the apartment, then climbing three flights of stairs was murder. The building had one temperature hot, hot, and hotter, so my room mate and I sweltered, especially in the winter. That late Fall on Grey Cup Sunday, it was bitterly cold outside, but we were trying to cool off with our patio door opened a crack...well, maybe a little more than that. What happened no one intended, but the water in the radiator pipe running under the window froze and burst. Water flooded everywhere on our lovely red carpet. The flood was bad enough but the rich landlord's girlfriend came to investigate and she was pretty irate. It was not a hallmark night. Seems to me I was cooking chili in the apartment next door, drinking beer, smoking, and losing my sense of taste or something because every time I popped back into check and stir the chili, I thought it needed a little more chili powder. If memory serves me, the chili was not the hit I thought it would be.
Classes in the College of Arts at university were in huge lecture theatres that housed two or three hundred students. No one cared if you were there or not and they certainly didn't mark attendance. In fact, they were hoping to weed you out that first year. I began to find it easier to sleep through my morning classes and just attend the afternoon ones. Taxis and hitch-hiking became a much preferred method of transport, but my pocket book began to suffer. My social life remained viable because a whole pile of friends from back home had also moved into the city to either work or go to school. We had fun. I passed that first year with low marks and one fail in French. My Hudson Bay highschool French was no match for an all French class, i.e. no English allowed. I still don't know what the required reading, "Le Petit Prince" was really about. I remember giving a recap of the story to the prof, in French and him just shaking his head. The only reason I took French was because I heard how boring the English class was. Highschool in the early 1970's in rural Saskatchewan had no guidance counsellors...even if there had been though, I probably wouldn't have listened to any advice, because I knew it all.
As you can imagine, that first year of university was a disappointment for me. I learned to like the city by then, found the Biology museum and visited the Forestry Farm zoo and other interesting places like the Mendel Art Gallery often. We took long walks along the river bank and walked across the bridges to downtown. We got picked up by a cop once for jaywalking. We pled ignorance which was no defence, but it worked, because as we explained, where we came from everybody did it. The riverbank was not as developed as it is today, but the Broadway area was unique and the University, Broadway and Victoria bridges were as beautiful as they are today. They held an ominous element though, because every so often somebody would jump off one and that would make everyone stand up and take notice that life wasn't always wonderful for everyone. Two bars downtown were popular student hangouts - Jack's and Yip's. The Sportsman Bar on 8th Street was another place we frequented. For some reason, I drank my first and only zombie ever in that bar and wound up in the emergency ward because I was developing a kidney infection at the same time! As you can imagine, I learned early on to curb my alcohol intake because I generally got violently ill. Other than the social life, I didn't take to the university scene that first year, and by April, which was the end of it, I had searched my soul and that of my parents, and we all opted for me to go to business college. Mom and Dad were supportive, they just wanted me to find some way to support myself and I agreed.
I whizzed through a legal secretarial course and got honours. I loved it and my first job was in a fairly big law office in Saskatoon. We worked on real estate transactions, wills, criminal and divorce cases. Overall, it was a good learning experience. I had sewn several outfits to wear for my new career and I remember wearing a green polka dot skirt and top to my first interview where the male boss hired me on the spot. Being naive, I attributed my good luck to my fledgling sewing abilites. By a stroke of good luck the finished products had turned out really well. (I still had not heard the wisecracks about 'sexetaries' and really didn't hear about them until a long while later). Those were the days of the miniskirt. The lawyer I was assigned to had a wonderful sense of humour and he went on to build a great reputation in his career. He even became somewhat of a staple on the evening television news, at the very least a familiar face. I only stayed at that law office for about a year because I got engaged and was moving back home to be with my fiancee. and make plans for our wedding. Right about that time, I was taken out for lunch by an old friend from home who was a lawyer in another Saskatoon office. He was someone that was older than me and was heavily involved in youth politics. We went to some of the same events. His mother knew my mother. He was asking me if I would go to work for him, but I declined in favor of moving away to be with my boyfriend. Think of how things might look today if my life had gone down that path!
Back in Hudson Bay, I boarded with some old family friends until the wedding, Alex and Beatrice. She was a fabulous cook! My soon-to-be husband was renting a house with a couple of friends. We would buy that house for $9,000.00, if you can imagine it. Thank goodness my dad was a generous man and could loan us the money. We were able to pay him back when we sold it and doubled our money! We were ecstatic...and it was 1975. I found a job as a clerical person in a bank and that was fun too. I knew everyone there and almost all the customers. In that town, the people working in the forestry industry were making really big money and it was exciting to see them come in. I was good at doing the secretarial work, but when it came to helping out with the banking stuff, I really should have kept to what I knew. I got a kick out of watching the different people come in to access their safety deposit boxes. I remember one elderly bachelor who had a real ritual with some numbers he had written down and was very secretive about everything. I always wondered what he was up to, but of course that was strictly private and confidential. I had gone from making about $300.00 per month in the law office to doubling it at the bank. I was making over $600.00 per month! All my bosses up to this point were males.
We got married and within a few months the entrepreneurial spirit hit so my husband and I bought a flower shop. It was in the same town as my parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and a whole pile of other relatives, so things were exciting. While in the flower shop, I also worked a maternity leave position part-time for the legal aide office and that was superbly interesting. The criminal cases and the messy divorces were the best. I was surrounded by some of the best co-workers you could ever find. We worked hard and laughed hard. One of the young lawyers rented the suite above our flower shop so we got to know him quite well. Although he eventually moved on and we did too, we were saddened to hear a few years later that he had drowned in his bathtub. Unfortunately, he had a condition that caused seizures. Rest in peace Gabe Burkhart.
It was never my intention to try to pretend that I had a flare for floral designing. I didn't. I knew nothing about it really. My plan was to continue with my career as a legal secretary. As it turned out, the workload in the flower shop was unbelievable and even though my job was to do books, I soon became the clerk, delivery person, flower picker upper, jack-of-all-trades and oh my goodness....floral designer. Not often, but when we were absolutely swamped and desperate on certain days like Mother's Day or Valentines or Christmas, I would step in to help with designing. I normally kept to simple, low key things like corsages, wreaths, or sprays but soon I graduated to casket pieces and arrangements. It was ironic that me, the fake designer could put almost anythng into the display fridge on those days and have it bought up from under my nose by these frantic last minute shopping men who waited for the midnight hour to pick something up for their women. It was fun, it was exhilarating and it was plenty of laughs. For awhile we stocked these little fat kitchen witches and I loved them. I was excitedly talking about them one day to a customer, saying, how did she get so fat with that little wee mouth?...and she suddenly said, "I'll take one!" I started laughing, because of all things, I certainly never thought of myself as a high pressure salesperson, and it appeared that I had just been one! In fact, I remember saying to her, "oh no, you don't have to", but it was too late, she wanted one.
During the five years we had the flower shop, I went through two pregnancies and gave birth to two babies. Then we moved back to Hudson Bay for my husband to return to his former job, and I travelled back to Melfort for a week every month to do the flower shop books. After a short time though, my husband became one of the casualties to a massive lay off at his workplace. To make ends meet, I went to work full time at a government office for tourism and renewable resources. That was my best job ever. We were four women out of an entire staff of men. Men are generally great to work with and far better than working with women. Men never sit around complaining or whining about what's wrong like women do. They either hang their heads and grumble or just laugh everything off. They make fun of each other and call each other nicknames like bullet head or godzilla. They treated all of us women like beauty queens whether we were or not. They were notorious flirts and took every opportunity to try to come onto any of us. One guy admitted to me that he didn't care what the woman looked like because he could always put a paper bag over her head! Turkey! All in all, I have very fond memories of that place and those guys. They were just what I needed. I lost weight, I started to fit into clothes I hadn't worn in a couple of years. I was married and they knew it. I was loyal to my husband and they knew it, but that made it all the more memorable.
Next my husband got a call from a former co-worker to accept a job in Saskatoon, so off we moved. I stayed home with the kids over the summer, but come Fall, 1983, I started looking for work and found it as a clerical person at a post-secondary institution. I worked for several areas, facilities, the vice principal of programs, human resources and the bookstore. I went part-time after about a year and then started taking night classes towards nursing. By 1987, I enrolled in nursing full time and kept working part-time at the same facility. We moved to Prince Albert in 1988 and I finished my training as a diploma nurse in 1989. My kids were in elementary school by this time and we had bought a trampoline. Super Channel was a new thing and computer games were really catching on. Mario Bros. is one I can remember the kids playing.
I went to work casual for the Holy Family Hospital and for the Victorian Order of Nurses. I worked on two floors - maternity and nursery, and medicine/palliative care. I did a variety of things with the VON such as worked at the health centres at Weyerhaeuser and Woodland Campus. I also participated in mass immunizations at places like the Correctional Centre and the Fire Hall. Now suddenly, all my bosses were women.
By 1990, the VON negotiated a contract with Woodland Campus to provide a health nurse, and I was it. That job lasted eight years and I thoroughly enjoyed it. By 1998, I left for a year to perform a temporary nurse manager position at Herb Bassett Nursing Home. When I returned, I became an instructor for the Home Care/Special Care Aide program. By 2004, I had obtained my Bachelor of Science in Nursing and moved to Melfort to take a management position at a nursing home there. After two years, I was ready to move back to Saskatoon and be near my kids. By this time, they were married and contemplating having babies of their own. I took another management position for a year again in a nursing home and was enticed back to post-secondary education by an ad in the paper.
It is now five years since I began as program head for the Practical Nursing program. We are wondering how to celebrate this landmark year. A condition of the job was to obtain a master's degree and I did so in 2010. That same year, just to be on the safe side, I also did the training to be a real estate agent, but that's for after I retire. Retirement?? That won't be for at least eight years and probably more if the government gets its way!
No comments:
Post a Comment