[SuziQ]

Heh, just out of college, I worked as a telephone operator and outside sales radio operator for a Lumber Company. My desk was just inside the doors from the Lumber yard sales desk. Boy did I get an education in 'tough-speak'! I'd never heard such foul language in my life. Fortunately, I wasn't inclined to pick it up. If I'd come home talking like that, my Daddy woulda washed my 21 yr. old mouth out with soap!

[Rose in RoseBear]

<laughing> I was hired for my second job, at the newspaper, because the girl who had been doing my job was afraid of computer terminals and the typesetters, the men who actaully assembled the newspaper from printed strips of heavy white paper (called galleys) that were stuck to poster boards using hot wax.

(For more on this process, which predated true computerization of newspaper production, see here.)

The first day, I walked upstairs to the typesetter's den deathly afraid. What would they do? The girl who'd worked there before me had been unwilling to come in to brief me. So I walked in alone, to proofread ...

And met some of the nicest men around, full of fun and always cracking jokes that, to me, were well within the boundaries of propriety.

One woman's frightening harrassment is another's funny joke ...