Milestones from my life: 40 years ago today, I was promoted to management 
by Bill Jones

Forty years ago tonight – October 7, 1981, Joanna and I were celebrating my promotion to management as a supervisor with Mountain Bell Telephone Company in Denver. It was an exciting time, a meaningful achievement.

So how did I get to that point? When I was in college, being a manager/supervisor with the phone company was the furthest thing from my mind. Never even imagined it!

When I entered Oklahoma Baptist University in September 1969, my career path was clear and certain: I was going to spend my life as a music minister in Baptist churches. It was all I had wanted to do since I was 14 or so. As a teenager, my world revolved around church and, especially, youth choir. My music minister, Joe Dell Rust, an OBU grad, had become a friend, mentor, and example to me. (By the way, Joe and Martha Rust are in their 80s now and are still very dear friends of mine. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed.)

So I entered OBU studying for a Church Music degree – major in voice, minor in piano – with no doubt about my faith or my future. Then, in November of my sophomore year, I experienced the earth-shaking crisis of faith that would change my life, thus my future, in every way imaginable. I wrote about that last November: 50 years ago today, Nov. 12, 1970, I leapt out of the fundamentalist foxhole.

Suddenly, I was lost in more ways than one. One of those was career-wise; you couldn’t be a music minister – or any other type of Christian minister – if you didn’t believe in God! Duh! So I had to change my degree program. Not really having an interest in anything but music, I switched from Church Music to Music Education. I continued to search and struggle, faith-wise, and was no closer to a renewed – or new – faith in God as I approached graduation than I was on that November day in 1970. So, upon graduation, the degree of Bachelor of Music Education was conferred upon me.

Only one problem with that – I never really had any desire to teach! So if I had entered OBU with my career path clear and certain, I exited OBU with a career path as muddy and confused as the struggle I was having with faith.

By this time, Joanna and I had started dating, and she had just completed her freshman year; besides that, my parents were getting ready to move from the KC, MO, home in which I had grown up, and head back to their beloved Texas.

So I stayed in Shawnee, trying to figure out what to do with my life. While working various jobs, I went back to OBU and took some business courses – Joanna and I even had one class together (she was an Accounting major), but soon decided this wasn’t for me. Then for some crazy reason, I decided to go to law school; I scored in the 96^th percentile of the Law School Admission Test and was accepted for admission to the University of Oklahoma School of Law. I attended three semesters, struggled throughout, began the fourth semester but finally had to admit that I wasn’t cut out for life as a lawyer, so I withdrew.

By this time, Joanna and I were married, and she had gotten a job – in November 1976, just 2 months after we were married – as a financial analyst with Mobil Oil’s Oklahoma City Accounting office. After I quit law school in February 1977, I got a job as assistant manager – which is really a glorified clerk/cashier – with 7-11 stores.

That summer, though, came the news that Mobil was moving its Oklahoma City office to Denver, CO, so we moved to Denver at the end of August. (If anyone wonders how I became a Denver Broncos fan, that’s how – the 10 years we spent in Denver, during which the Broncos went to their first two Super Bowls. Over 30 years after moving to Cowboys country, I’m still a loyal Broncos fan!)

After we moved to Denver, I got another job as an assistant manager – this time with McDonald’s – another company for which “assistant manager” is basically another name for “long hours, grunt work, low pay.”

After a few months, though, I wanted something that promised the opportunity for advancement, so I got a job in March 1978 with Mountain Bell Telephone. I had a brief history – 15 months – with Southwestern Bell in Shawnee as a telephone operator on the old cordboard. My new job with Mountain Bell would also be as a telephone operator, but the phone company had been modernizing, and I worked as an operator on the then-new computerized TSPS push-button board.

However, there were many areas of employment in the Bell System, and lots of opportunities for transfers, advancement, etc. So after 6 months or so in this job, I began scouting around for other possibilities and, by November, received a requested transfer to a clerical position in the Accounting Department in northwest Denver.

In March 1981, I turned 30, and in April, Joanna and I learned that she was expecting our first child. I seem to recall that I had an internal goal – probably never voiced, just something within me – of achieving a management position by the time I turned 30. That time passed, and I still wasn’t in management, but I still hoped that I could do so before our first child came along. I had attended Mountain Bell’s management assessment program, known as HRA (Human Resources Assessment), sometime in 1980, as I recall.

I apparently scored pretty well at HRA, because in September my supervisor called me to her desk with the news that the supervisor of the Billing Adjustments unit was moving to another position, and her manager wanted to interview me for that position. On October 6, I was offered the job as supervisor of the Billing Adjustments unit, and my promotion became effective the next day. So it was 40 years ago today that I first walked into that unit – as supervisor, as management.

I supervised 10 clerks, all of whom at that time were women. I remained in that position for 2½ years. It was an interesting, strange, gratifying, frustrating, stressful 2½ years. But it could have been much worse. My boss, Kathy McKibbin – who was over four or five supervisors – was, truthfully, the best boss I’ve ever had; and my latest count showed about 30 to 35 bosses I’ve had over the years! When I began that job, Kathy told me she was not the kind of boss who “hovered” over her charges, and that became a joke between us during the next couple of years – “Are you hovering?” Seriously, though, she let me do my job, but she also was always available to provide support whenever I needed it.

Kathy’s boss, Doug Gillespie, tended to be rather heavy-handed, and particularly liked to please those he considered his “clients” – the managers of the business offices. There were certain legalities we had to follow concerning accounting for moneys that the business offices deemed to not be collectible, and I faithfully followed the standard practice as I had been advised; sometimes those rulings hurt the ratings of the business office managers, and they went complaining to Doug. The ONLY time Doug called me to his office and demanded that I change my ruling to satisfy one of his favorite business office managers was while Kathy was on vacation. (I documented that I was changing it only because of Doug Gillespie’s orders.) Doug would never have tried that had Kathy been there, because she would have stood up for me and not let him get away with it.

Kathy was a friend and a wonderful boss. All of her supervisors loved working for her.

I mentioned that I supervised 10 women from the time I arrived. However, during my tenure there, we did ultimately hire one young man to replace a woman who had left. Wouldn’t you know it? We had to fire the one man who worked for me! Turned out the guy – who was married and had a little daughter – was making long-distance calls, on the company phone, to his girlfriend, who lived in Dallas, TX! (We discovered this after Kathy & I had already gone to bat for him once before, saving his job that time, after it was learned that, while on active duty with the Army Reserves, he had charged long-distance calls to his sergeant’s phone number!)

There’s a funny epilogue to that story. In 1987, Mobil moved its Denver office to Dallas, so we again moved with Joanna’s job, this time to Plano, a suburb north of Dallas. By that time, we had two small children, so we decided I would stay home for the next few years & take care of the kids, get them to school, etc. One day, maybe a few months after we had moved to Plano, two men in dark suits knocked on my door. They explained that they were from the federal government and were checking on a man who had applied for a government job. Turns out it was the guy I had had to fire at Mountain Bell, and he had given them MY name as a character reference. (I assume he had left his wife & moved to Dallas to be with the girlfriend. I already knew he wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the box, but giving MY name as a character reference?) Well, I told them about his character all right, or at least his activities that indicated a complete lack of character! I seriously doubt that he got that job.

It wasn’t long after I walked into the Billing Adjustments unit as supervisor that I learned that I had a very determined adversary who already hated me even though she had just met me. (I must make some good first impression, huh?) And she was my assistant! Elouise’s title was “supervisory clerk,” meaning that she was paid a little more than the other clerks, and her job was to assist the supervisor in running the office. She had the same position under the previous supervisor, had attended management assessment (HRA) as I had, and had been certain that she would be the new supervisor. In other words, I had taken the job she had expected to get AND to which she believed she was entitled.

Long story short, for the next two years, I was constantly brought before union reps to answer complaints made by Elouise. I was a strong supporter – and still am – of labor unions, but these reps sorely tested my support, because I found one in particular, with whom I had to deal quite often, to be an inveterate liar, just like her “client.”

Also, Elouise was Hispanic, and she turned every perceived slight – by either the company or me personally – into a discrimination complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, so I also found myself occasionally answering questions from an EEOC rep, whom I found much more trustworthy than the union rep.

One day, I had directed Elouise to do something that was clearly a part of her job responsibilities, and she jabbed her index finger in my direction, and said, “YOU do it!” Employee/employer guidelines gave me the right to suspend her on the spot for insubordination, but I had been bending over backwards to treat her fairly and respectfully – despite her actions toward me – and I really didn’t want to go that far. So instead, I placed her on “warning of suspension.” That was a concession on my part, but she used it instead as an excuse for further attacks.

She brought a lawsuit against Mountain Bell, accusing the company of discriminating against her in promoting me instead of her to the supervisor position. I was named, as well, for placing her on warning of suspension. She accused me of “retaliating” against her for her actions toward me.

All of this was going on against the backdrop of the announcement we had received – in February 1982, if I recall correctly – that, after a long court battle, AT&T would be divesting itself of its local service companies on January 1, 1984. For almost 2 years following this announcement, much of our work as supervisors was to prepare our units for divestiture.

Then, of course, there was the 3-week strike, in August 1983, of the Communications Workers of America. This was probably the LEAST stressful time of my tenure as supervisor – mainly because Elouise and her colleagues were out of the building during this time. A colleague of mine, who supervised another unit in the department, called his employees “killers.” I think all of us had appreciation for at least some of our employees, but there were times that any of us could sympathize with his “killers” sentiment.

Soon after I was promoted as supervisor, I began joining – for breaks and lunches – a group of other supervisors, and we all became fast friends. Our breaks and lunches together became a time for us to laugh together, joke together, and also relate to each other’s struggles in the office. We even got together once or twice a year at somebody’s house for a party. Joanna and I hosted one or two of these get-togethers. We enjoyed getting to know each other’s “significant others,” caring about what was happening with each other’s kids, and so forth.

One of those friends/colleagues sent us a postcard while on vacation, in which he wrote, “Hi to the gang,” except that his writing was a little unclear, and “gang” appeared to be “gong.” From then on, we were known as “the gong.”

We also supported each other in the tough times. That same colleague had two teenage daughters. One of them fell seriously ill in the fall of 1983 and died the following January. We all felt his pain as much as we could, trying to put ourselves in his place – what if we had lost a beloved child? We rallied around him, went to her funeral, did our best to love him through this sorrowful time. To this day, he talks about the love and care we gave him at that time. It was a tight-knit group that really cared for each other. Being part of the “gong” was probably the very best thing that came out of that promotion to management for me.

During that strike in August 1983, we had to work extremely long hours and do the work that our employees would normally do. But we had “perks” – free food in the cafeteria (which meant not only lunch but dinner, too, because we were usually there well into the evening); and “strike duty,” which meant sitting out next to the fence, monitoring the picketers, making sure there were no violations, violent activity toward those coming to work, etc. It was usually a pretty easy gig.

The “gong” got a little loopy at times during the strike. I recall one time that we all took a walk outside around the building after dinner. One of our guys had an extreme phobia of grasshoppers. Well, of course, one of the group picked up a grasshopper and held it out toward him, chasing him into the building. Who would happen to be standing sternly in the lobby as we all ran into the building, laughing, but Lloyd Burton, the 5^th-level manager who was head of the entire Accounting Department! You’ve never seen a group of people straighten up so quickly and walk so quietly to the elevators!

From January 1983 on, a Mountain Bell attorney had been preparing us to go into court and defend ourselves – and the company – against Elouise’s lawsuit. Early on, he had asked Kathy and me, “Do you feel you did anything that’s wrong? Do you have anything to hide?” We both said no, we didn’t, that we had both been scrupulously fair and respectful to Elouise. Then, he said, don’t worry about it. Just tell the truth, BUT don’t volunteer anything that you’re not asked. Just answer the questions truthfully.

We went into court on October 3, 1983. The trial lasted four days. Only one person was allowed to sit with the lawyer at his table throughout the trial – Kathy, because of her position representing the company, took that seat. All other defense witnesses – including me – had to stay outside the courtroom except when called to testify. Most of what I know about the trial is from what Bruce and Kathy told me, and from the judge’s ruling, a copy of which I received following the trial.

The trial lasted four days. Kathy was extremely worried. I really wasn’t. I felt confident that the truth would out. It was what you might call a hybrid trial – the six-person jury had part of the ruling, and the judge was responsible for the rest. Not sure I understand that to this day.

Anyway, the main thing I recall about my own testimony is being reprimanded by the judge. I don’t even remember the specific questions I was asked, and I don’t recall Bruce’s questioning of me at all. However, I do remember that Elouise’s lawyer struck me as sleazy, unprofessional, and unorganized. He asked me one question that I couldn’t understand at all. So I tried to ask him to clarify, saying, “Are you asking . . . ?” I didn’t get far with my question before the judge stopped me and, in overly dramatic fashion, said, “Mr. Jones, we have had this legal system in America for 200 years. In our system, the attorney asks the questions, not the witness!”

All I could say was, meekly, “Yes, your honor,” and then try my best to answer the question as I understood it.

However, that one bad moment with the judge means little now. (though I still say he was overly dramatic; all he had to say was, “Mr. Jones, just answer the question”) I don’t recall exactly when the testimony ended, but I don’t think the judge and jury were out very long. Anyway, early Thursday evening, we were called back to the courthouse to hear the verdict. We won! Elouise had sued Mountain Bell and lost. After putting up with her hostility for 2 years, I was vindicated, and so was Mountain Bell. In his ruling, the judge wrote that “Mr. Jones was clearly more qualified than Ms. Maez for a management position.”

Remember the instruction from our attorney – that we not volunteer anything we aren’t asked, that we simply answer the questions truthfully? Well, I doubt that Elouise’s attorney was savvy enough to so instruct Elouise; but even if he had, it wouldn’t have done any good. Elouise could never restrain herself from talking . . . and talking . . . and talking far afield . . .  and talking with a voice dripping with anger and hostility . . . so that it would become obvious to any judge and jury that here’s someone out for vengeance who doesn’t have any particular loyalty to the facts. Her entire demeanor likely made them distrust her as soon as she opened her mouth.

In December, just before divestiture, Elouise took the offer – made to all employees – to transfer from Mountain Bell to AT&T’s new Information Systems company. I was looking forward to the opportunity to supervise without an assistant who was openly hostile and fighting me at every turn. It would be a fresh start! Then Kathy announced she was retiring, effective December 31. Her replacement soon set me up for an interview as a manager with the Mountain Bell corporate office in downtown Denver. I told her I didn’t want to go there, that I wanted to stay where I was. She told me I didn’t have a choice. She had someone else in mind to take my place – a guy who had worked for her in her old department – and she was determined to get me out of there. So, in April 1984, I moved downtown to the corporate office, no longer a supervisor (no longer with “killers” – or anyone else – working for me); still in management but as corporate support/liaison to the Accounting Department, writing office manuals, etc.

I was there for the next 3 years. In early 1987, Mobil announced they were moving the Denver office to Dallas; around the same time, Mountain Bell was trying to downsize – part of the aftermath of the 1984 divestiture from AT&T – so they offered what became known as the “Baby Boomer Buyout.” They offered young managers like me – with at least 5 years in management – a year’s salary to leave the payroll by April 1. So I took it. They also offered help with a new career. I knew I wanted to write. So, in addition to paying me a full year’s salary, they paid for a contractor to build floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my study in our new house in Plano, as well as a new printer for my computer, and two big filing cabinets. Not a bad severance!

We moved from Denver to Plano in August 1987. In March 1990, after exclusively staying home with our kids for 3 years (though I did take a writing course and even got a short story published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1989), I began a 20-year career as a technical writer & editor in the corporate world.

I can’t close this without saying that there was one constant through all of this – Joanna, the love of my life, my wife, my partner, my companion, and my constant support (and I mean support in every way, including financially, because it was Joanna’s steady employment with Mobil Oil – as a financial analyst, she always earned much more than I – that gave our family financial security through all of my layoffs, etc., through the years).

Nothing I have done or accomplished meant anything apart from my sharing it with her. Sharing our lives with each other – our successes, our (usually my) failures, our joys, our sorrows – meant everything to us. These days, everything in my life comes back to one thing – I miss Joanna with every breath I take. Thanks be to God for blessing me with her love for 48 years. The story I’ve shared here is not my story – it’s our story, because Joanna went through every bit of it with me (and listened patiently to every bit of my complaining about Elouise).

(By the way, Joanna has been my editor through the years. I read most of my blog posts, etc., especially anything controversial, to her before publishing them, and she would often offer valuable feedback, ‘tweaking’ a word or phrase here or there, and sometimes even suggesting I cut whole passages. She was wiser than I, and I trusted her judgment. So before publishing this, I just went to our bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed across from her recliner, and read it as I used to do. Maybe she heard it; I hope so.)