热身词语

　　receptionist: traditionally a woman who sat in the front office of a building, answered phones and received guests (now someone who answers the company's phone)

　　the dumb broad: (offensive) the silly woman

　　press party: a party for newspaper and magazine writers

　　name tag: something you wear that says your name (at company parties or trainings, meetings, etc.)

　　function: work in the company

　　servomechanism: a fancy name to mean "person responsible for the job of service"

　　I changed my opinion of receptionists because now I'm one. It wasn't the dumb broad at the front desk who took telephone messages. She had to be something else because I thought I was something else. I was fine until there was a press party. We were having a fairly intelligent conversation. Then they asked me what I did. When I told them, they turned around to find other people with name tags. I wasn't worth bothering with. I wasn't being rejected because of what I had said or the way I talked, but simply because of my function. After that, I tried to make up other names for what I did-communications control, servomechanism.

　　feasible: can be done, practical to do

　　filter: take the good and get rid of the bad

　　I don't think they'd ever hire a male receptionist. They'd have to pay him more, for one thing. You can't pay someone who does what I do very much. It isn't economically feasible. You're there just to filter people and filter telephone calls. You're there just to handle the equipment. You're treated like a piece of equipment, like the telephone.

　　headpiece: equipment with earphones to listen to the call and a small mouthpiece for talking into

　　You come in at nine, you open the door, you look at the piece of machinery, you plug in the headpiece. That's how my day begins. You tremble when you hear the first ring. After that, it's sort of "downhill"-unless there's somebody on the phone who is either kind or nasty. The rest of the people are just non, they don't exist. They're just voices. You answer calls, you connect them to others, and that's it.

　　contact: communication, exchange

　　satirical: funny in a way that ridicules other people or things

　　abrupt: short, no room for courtesy

　　clipped: same as abrupt

　　I don't have much contact with people. You can't see them. You don't know if they're laughing, if they're being satirical or being kind. So your conversations become very abrupt. I notice that in talking to people. My conversations would be very short and clipped, in short sentences, the way I talk to people all day on the telephone.

　　carry over: it affects one's life at home

　　interruption: something ends before you have finished (because of something else that bothers you)

　　I never answer the phone at home. It carries over. The way I talk to people on the phone has changed. Even when my mother calls, I don't talk to her very long. I want to see people to talk to them. But now, when I see them, I talk to them like I was talking on the telephone. It isn't a conscious process. I don't know what's happened. When I'm talking to someone at work, the telephone rings, and the conversation is interrupted. So I never bother finishing sentences or finishing thoughts. I always have this feeling of interruption.

　　punch press: an old type of machine for making cards when computers used cards

　　quickie: things that are easy to finish in a very short time

　　You can think about this thing and all of a sudden the telephone rings and you've got to jump right back. There isn't a ten-minute break in the whole day that's quiet. I once worked at a punch press, when I was in high school. A part-time job. You sat there and watched it for four, five hours. You could make up stories about people and finish them. But you can't do that when you've got only a few minutes. You can't pick it up after the telephone call. You can't think, you can't even finish a letter. So you do quickie things, like read a chapter in a short story. It has to be short-term stuff.

　　slow down: go at a slower speed

　　switch the call: send a telephone call from your phone to someone else's phone

　　I notice people have asked me to slow down when I'm talking. What I do all day is to say what I have to say as quickly as possible and switch the call to whoever it's going to. If I'm talking to a friend, I have to make it quick before I get interrupted.

　　fill up: to make your time full of…

　　fantasy: like a dream in the daytime

　　rambling: with no structure, just saying what you like, without thinking

　　You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you're going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don't have a very good one and you bore easily, you're in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.

　　Mondrian: the name of an artist

　　I do some drawings-Mondrian, sort of. Peaceful colors of red and blue. Very ordered life. I'd like to think of rainbows and mountains. I never draw humans. Things of nature, never people. I always dream I'm alone and things are quiet. I call it the land of no-phone, where there isn't any machine telling me where I have to be every minute.

　　embarrassed: feel uncomfortable about something, maybe because you think it's not right

　　euphemism: a nicer way to say something

　　live: to a person and not to the phone

　　blushed: your cheeks get red because you are uncomfortable

　　Oh sure, sometimes you have to lie for other people. That's another thing: having to make up stories for them if they don't want to talk to someone on the telephone. At first I'd feel embarrassed and I'd feel they knew I was lying. There was a sense of emptiness. There'd be a silence, and I'd feel guilty. At first I tried to think of a euphemism for "He's not, here." It really bothered me. Then I got tired of doing it, so I just say, "He's not here." You're not looking at the person, you're talking to him over the instrument. So after a while it doesn't really matter. The first time it was live. The person was there. I'm sure I blushed. He probably knew I was lying. And I think he understood I was just the instrument, not the source.

　　dread: fear and hate

　　loom: come into sight in a way that seems large and unfriendly

　　fill out a form: complete by writing on a piece of paper on which you have to put in certain information in the place given (like name, address, telephone number, etc.)

　　type: use a keyboard

　　Until recently I'd cry in the morning. I didn't want to get up. I'd dread Fridays because Monday was always looming over me. Another five days ahead of me. There never seemed to be any end to it. Why am I doing this? Yet I dread looking for other jobs. I don't like filling out forms and taking typing tests. I remember on applications I'd put down, "I'd like to deal with the public." Well, I don't want to deal with the public any more.

　　el: elevated train

　　I take the bus to work. That was my big decision. I had to go to work and do what everyone else told me to do, but I could decide whether to take the bus or the el. To me, that was a big choice. Those are the only kinds of decisions you make and they become very important to you.

　　dejected: having or showing low spirits

　　pull out: take out from a bag

　　feed: pass on a feeling to someone else without talking

　　relief: feeling that difficulty has passed

　　put up with: handle; stand

　　Very few people talk on the bus going home. Sort of sit there and look dejected. Stare out the window, pull out the newspaper, or push other people. You feel tense until the bus empties out or you get home. Because things happen to you all day long, things you couldn't get rid of. So they build up, and everybody is feeding them into each other on the bus. There didn't seem to be any kind of relief about going home. It was: Boy! Did I have a lot of garbage to put up with!

　　fostered: taken care of

　　I don't know what I'd like to do. That's what hurts the most. That's why I can't quit the job. I really don't know what talents I may have. And I don't know where to go to find out. I've been fostered so long by school and didn't have time to think about it.

　　switchboard: a central board which connects different telephone lines

　　My father's in watch repair. That's always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don't think I'd mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you're doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don't do much of anything.

　　I think the whole idea of receptionists is going to change. We're going to have to find machines which can do that sort of thing. You're wasting an awful lot of human power.