"The First Years Were the Best Years" -- Why Couldn't I Make It Last? (employees, employer)

[2nd trick op]

Looking back from retirement, I can see now that my first year at college, and the summer which followed it were the high point of my post-high-school life -- at least so far as personal satisfaction and contentment were concerned.

Within a week or two of settling in on campus (with the exception of a couple of cousins, I was the first in my family to attend) I recognized that most of my time was now my own, and I no longer would be forced to participate in the regimentation and conformity which had dominated the previous twelve years, I didn't "display" rebellion via longer hair, sloppy dress, etc, but I was free to be myself, and I loved it. (And in consequence, the opportunity for independent study pushed my grades up). And over the next three summers, I successfully held down a part-time job at a local factory. The time was the late Sixties, the plant was unionized, and overtime was easy-to-get and plentiful.

But I could sense, and well before I graduated, that most of the things that made the undergraduate days so enjoyable weren't fated to last. During my senior year, I took two of what were called "capstone" courses. The only real lessons I took away from both were that most organizational problems spring from the basic discontents of the human condition, and an admonition from one instructor that "this course is probably closer to the real world than anything you've done so far".

And so after some experimentation with graduate-level coursework, I left for the working world with a newly-minted credential. Unfortunately, the community I which I settled bore little resemblance to the better-educated atmosphere to which I'd become accustomed. The few women I met, if not involved with someone else, were often divorced, jaded and/or predatory. I was well on my way to a classic case of "failure to launch".

The one satisfaction I was able to take at this point was the nature of the work itself. The employer was a trucking line under a "safety consent order" from Federal regulators, and our work was closely monitored. I was soon able to demonstrate the "hard numbers" which proved I was discharging my duties effectively. My regular late-night assignment involved very little office politics, and since the job was not exempted from overtime pay regulations, I was pulling down some pretty nice bucks from the 52-to-60-hour work weeks, and putting them to good use.

Unfortunately for me, my department supervisor, and most of his peers, were veterans of the World War II "GI generation"; two of the three young men with whom I shared my specific duties were recent Vietnam vets, and the third a military retiree. My performance eventually merited a "promotion" -- but to a straight salary, a "spit-and-polish" atmosphere, and all the constant feigned self-effacement of corporate life. This set the stage for a permanently-defensive attitude on my part; for the rest of my working life, I could recall very few "performance reviews" at which I felt at ease.

The job ended after a little over two years, the victim of an economic downturn. I was selected to be furloughed instead of either of the two young vets (the "double-dip" military retiree had previously been terminated for attitudinal issues). This pattern was to hold for a succession of roles, in a number of locations, some of them very challenging, but I never could accept the mechanism by which the ambitions and enthusiasm of most entry-level employees are subjugated and destroyed, and while I understand perfectly the need for freedom of enterprise, I view the diversity movement of recent years as just another phase in the corporate world's search for a new supply of "fresh meat".