63 Words Per Minute by Kelsey Francis

The typing test was mandatory. My score: 63 Words Per Minute. The temp coordinator, a tall middle-aged woman with a long face told me the good news—my typing skills were fast enough to work in “serious” office environments. I could make coffee, answer phones, data entry and organize files. On a slip of yellow paper, she wrote the address of my first placement. Chrysler Credit Agency, just north of Baltimore.

“If it goes well, they might keep you for the rest of the summer. You’ll have three weeks to prove yourself.”

It was 1995, I was only 18, the summer after my freshman year of college, and I didn’t own any professional work clothes. Until then, my only summer jobs had been squirting artificial butter on popcorn at a movie theater and chasing screaming kids at a summer camp. But my paychecks from movie theaters and summer camps were so small, I barely had enough money to buy the books necessary for my first year of college.

I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., that had once been little more than a corner store surrounded by farmland. My father’s parents and grandparents had been chicken farmers in this now suburb, but due to economic downturns in the poultry market, they lost more and more of their farm to housing developments and powerlines. For almost my entire childhood, I lived in a small brick townhouse with my single mother one mile from giant single family homes with stone facades built on what had once been my great grandparents 200 acre farm. The main road that cuts through the neighborhood of McMansions still bears my family’s last name.

 As a public school teacher and single parent, my mom laughed and laughed when during my senior year of high school I asked her how much I had in my college savings account.

“Your college savings went to feed you and put a roof over your head.”

 I hadn’t needed to ask my mother about a college savings account. I knew the answer. But I asked anyway because I needed to hear it. Hearing her say there was no money and I’d be relying on student loans made it an incontrovertible fact. I could stop pretending I was like my friends who came from two parent households and didn’t share a wall with their neighbors.  

When I went to freshman orientation at the one state school where I had been accepted, I signed up for my first credit card at a booth set up in the student center. A guy who looked like Jared Leto in My So Called Life helped me fill out the paperwork and told me he liked my silver earrings. He could have taken anything from me and I would have given him even more.

My Jared Leto lookalike told me I now had a 5,000 credit limit and handed me a small blue cooler as a free gift. He smiled. “You’ll need this for tailgating.”

 By the end of my freshman year, I had lost the beer cooler and racked up 3,000 dollars in credit card debt buying books, gas, and late-night pizza. When the college forwarded my mail home at the end of the year, my mom opened the credit card bill.

“What are you going to do about this?” She held out the bill. There was no way my $4.65 an hour popcorn popping and $5.25 an hour kid corralling were going to cut it. I needed a summer job that would get me out of debt and allow me to save for sophomore year. 

“Start looking in the newspaper. If you don’t find a better job this summer, you’re digging yourself a hole you’ll never get out of.”  The advertisement for the temp agency said the starting rate was $7.25 an hour.

***

To prepare for my first day of serious office work, my mom took me to JC Penny and bought me various shades of beige pencil skirts and an array of navy blue blouses. I wore concert t-shirts and oversized sweaters, not blouses. She called this beige-navy combo an “office uniform.” She also told me that to complete the uniform, I needed to wear pantyhose. From her dresser, she retrieved a pair of Sheer Energy Natural Tan L’eggs in an egg-shaped container and plopped the plastic ovum into my hand. “You’ll hate them, but they’re part of the uniform.”

 The credit agency office was an air-conditioned fourth floor sea of cubicles in an office park of buildings made of glass. Inside those cubicles were women who all seemed much older than me and with hair so frosted, teased, and sprayed, that when I stood up from my desk, the tops of their heads looked like framed dandelion puffs. We were a Ladies Legion of Car Loan Processing Specialists.

My supervisor, Rob, a red-faced and perpetually angry middle-aged white man, sat in the cubicle behind me and wore an early version of a hands-free phone headset. All day he yelled over that headset about missing or late loan payments and screamed threats about repossession. Every day after lunch, Rob’s voice became hoarse and everyone he spoke to or about became a “piece of shit.”

A typical customer phone call went like this: “You want your wife to keep that Neon, don’t you? Well, you’ve had 90 days. I’m tired of calling you Mr. Winston. I don’t want to send Doug to your house, but if you can’t get your shit together and pay us the money you committed to paying us, he’ll be showing up. Remember, you signed that paperwork.”

While Rob yelled at customers over his headset all day, I entered car loan application details from around the region into a grey desktop computer. I sat next to a giant fax machine spitting out loan applications on glossy paper that curled like vegetable skin from a peeler. I took the facsimile applications and transferred customers’ financial information into my computer. I was efficient and Rob noticed. “You’re a quick one, aren’t you?”

The office was freezing, so by the second week I started wearing a beige cardigan over my navy blue blouses. I also started noticing a trend: lots of people making far less than $25,000 were buying luxury cars that cost well over $50,000. The loan was always approved. The customer was always happy and my supervisor was always angry by noon.

At lunch, in the windowless employee break room, I asked my desk neighbor, Linda, who seemed the youngest of the legion, why the company kept approving loans for people who probably wouldn’t be able to afford the payments in a few months. She laughed as she stabbed a fork into a giant cobb salad.

“Owning a Dodge Charger is a dream come true, hon. You gotta let people have that dream even for a little while,” Linda said.

On the last day of my three-week trial run, Rob brought in powdery white gas station doughnuts. He said I would be missed. He told me my quick typing skills meant more people got their loans. Apparently, I was helping people get behind the wheels of their dreams. He told me that if I didn’t want to return to college in the fall, he would give me a full time job in a second. My starting salary would be $18,000 and I’d get the employee discount when I wanted a new car. “I saw that junky Fix Or Repair Daily you drive.” He spelled out the letters, F-O-R-D and laughed at himself.

I said no thank you to the powdery doughnuts and to the full time job.

As I walked toward my car in the parking lot at the end of the day, Linda caught up to me.  “I can’t believe you turned down that employee discount! That offer would have been a dream come true when I was your age.” Over our break room lunches, I had learned Linda was 28 and had worked for Chrysler Credit for 10 years. She had been getting a new car every two years thanks to that employee discount.

“I took this temp job to get out of credit card debt from college,” I confessed.

“Oh, I get it. Your parents want you to go to college so you can make more money, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I thought about doing that too. But I would have needed a bunch of loans. I’d been broke before I even earned my first paycheck!” What I didn’t know is that Linda was right. I was currently broke and would stay broke. Three years later, when I graduated from college in 1998, I had 27,000 dollars in student loan debt and $4,500 in credit card debit.

On my drive home in the rusting 1986 light blue Ford Tempo I had bought off of my grandparents for 500 dollars and that rattled at speeds over 55, I wondered if I had made a mistake. My dreams were absent of wheels and horsepower. Instead, they were filled with words and paper. Maybe I could frost my hair and learn to like my red-faced angry supervisor.

***

At home, I peeled off the borrowed pantyhose and told my mom about the job offer. I was now wondering if I should have accepted it. She was reading a book stretched out on her bed while I rambled on about the salary and my shitty car. What if I just took a year off from college and worked there? I could afford a new car!

“Don’t type so fast in your next placement,” she said. She licked her finger and turned the page of her book without even looking up. She knew the allure of an employee car discount. She knew the burden of my student loans. She knew the dangers of credit card debt. She knew that despite all of these things, I needed to return to college in the fall.

She knew me.

I stopped wearing pantyhose for the rest of that summer and when the temp agency placed me for a two-week stint in a corporate defense attorney’s office, I took my time when typing file labels. I was slow to answer the phone and screwed up a dinner reservation. I returned to college in the fall driving my shitty rattling Ford Tempo and used my 63 words per minute skills for a short story about a very unprepared young woman trapped in an avalanche with nothing but a fork to dig herself out.

*

This piece grew from a writing prompt I saw somewhere about summer jobs. What I wrote about my camp counselor and movie theater jobs was kind of bleh, but I discovered I had much to say about the temp job for the car loan company. Honestly, that whole summer of working in high pressure office spaces at only eighteen was pretty eye-opening. I’ve been a high school English teacher to 12^th graders for 23 years now, so I see first-hand the outrageous burden the cost of going to college puts on many families. Making the decision to go or not to go and how to pay for it has only gotten more complicated. I’m currently finishing a low-residency program in creative nonfiction at Mountainview MFA through Southern New Hampshire University and this piece was first published in their literary magazine, Assignment Magazine.

“63 Words Per Minute” originally appeared in Assignment Magazine.

Image via Free Images.