Been a while...

 Well.

This morning began with an email announcing a deal with the union at one of our locations. Great news, and something I wanted to see amplified.

As it worked out, I had a working session today with the SharePoint guy who's been helping me build our new site. While we were talking, I mentioned the deal; he clearly hadn't heard - an interesting look at the way a piece of news that hugely affects our entire organization only really gets in front of those people who've been boots-on-the-ground. He and I talked about unions for a minute, and he mentioned a doc on Netflix he said was incredibly good.

After we finished our sandbox session, I edited the morning's announcement, and put it in the news web part.

And, after work, I turned on the doc.

It's hard for me to truly convey how watching this feels. Ambivalent, absolutely; but that barely touches the experience. I've watched a zillion documentaries in my life, but I've never before been anything remotely like the subject; here - at my age - with my career - 9 to 5 draws some blood.

One irony about this movie is that it focuses on SECRETARIES, uniting and becoming a force.

For an awful lot of my career - I am just enough years behind the women featured here - women's professional organizations have overlooked secretaries.

It is the irony of my age, that ten years before me, the center of gravity of women in offices was in the secretarial and clerical pool. So to organize women office workers was to organize clerical and secretarial workers.

By the time I came along... secretaries were "administrative assistants" - and anyone (any woman) who chose to do that job was sort of being pretended away. Women wanted business degrees and "real" jobs, and it was juuuuussst about time to call it old-fashioned to type for a living.

So women's professional orgs became focused on "real" professional women.

Admins became that bubble off to one side on the org chart, and became invisible.

My career marks the beginning of the "Except the admin" era. At the 1:14:30 mark of the documentary, there's one of those tonal shifts as we move toward the final chapter of the story - and the sound bite is: "Secretaries disappeared."

Which they did. Pushed downward into titles explicitly making us subservient, now admin "assistants" - pushed out and up, to do *anything* but typing memos, because that became shameful, not enough, for the peasants. The number of times I have endured people telling me I could basically "do better" - because, of course, what I choose to do is embarrassing, it's peon stuff. That one time a manager, with no malice intended, asked me about admin work because his wife was bored and she should be able to get an admin job easily.

I haven't apologized for the work I chose to do, for at least fifteen years. In my current job (nearly ten years), I am PROUD beyond expressing it, of the service I provide to each and every one of you in America. I literally feed you. Without what I do, it would not happen. What I do now is more important, even, than my work with the Federal Reserve Bank was, affects more of you, and is more deeply fundamental.

My career is neither trivial nor dismissable, yet it is routinely dismissed, and constantly, merely for its nature. I am not Mary Tyler Moore, nor Lily Tomlin. I belong to no union, because I'm that bubble on the side of the org chart. I blazed no trails, just have tucked in and made my way through several of the worst economies of the past 50 years - and covered myself in no glory at all. My activism is for other people, not myself. I am except the admin personified. And what once was Secretaries' Day, a celebration of professionals, is now Administrative Professionals day/week/month, an occasion of lip service par excellence which frequently is focused on flowers and gendered pap. (I hasten to say that my company has a highly creative and thoughtful person who manages our recognition. But the occasion itself does absolutely beg for lip service, and it gets it.)

9 to 5, the organization, is notable for being a women's movement that embraced intersectionality from its start. That is more than most white feminism of its time ever did.

It's also why I never heard of it, even having seen that movie with the same name. I was a WHITE feminist, until at least 2020 really. I didn't realize it, but the changes of the past several years are clear to me. I embrace that. And I recognize this: I was not intersectional because I didn't "get it". At all.

And so, this intersectional organization, that saw secretaries "disappear" at the 1:14:30 mark of the documentary... stopped being about me. It shifted focus to child care, it got its ass out of the office - indeed, out of typical "9 to 5" focus.

There is a woman in the doc who says at 1:17:38 or so, "By the time I came in as a young woman" things were different, nobody calls me their girl, etc. I can't tell whether she may be close to my age (55) or quite a lot younger, but I can say - by the time I came in, it was only *getting* different. I still made my share of coffee, for a lot of years - and I never, ever drank coffee. It was explicitly a job thing, and always a STUPID job thing. I never had sexual harassment issues with a manager, but I certainly had an unbelievable idiot or two. I never DIDN'T have anyone who thought my work was "less-than", for decades there. So, good for her.

But I am glad 9 to 5/925 did look away, did seek to get out of corporate office. I'm insulated and privileged, working in a cube or from home, in my side-bubble.