“Just because you’re paranoid...”
“Nuts”
“Humping Carlos”
“Nothing personal, but I hate men, and you’re
here.”
“Where’s my check?”
“Cha-ching”
“All’s fair in love and work.”
I began working for Milwaukee County in the state of Wisconsin in 1986. I was referred to Milwaukee County by the Department of vocational rehabilitation. I was injured in a car accident several years earlier and had applied for disability through SSA, but they denied it and instead referred me to the DVR. The counselor at DVR encouraged me to apply for a job with Milwaukee County, which I did. However, in a telephone conversation, the nice man from Milwaukee County told me that I was not eligible for his program if I could take the bus. I didn't try to make sense of what he said; I simply relayed this story back to the counselor at the DVR. He promptly got on the phone, and I guess he yelled at the guy from Milwaukee County who called me again and said I think you do qualify for my program after all. He had me come down for an interview, which I attended, and he proceeded to ask me questions about my experience and education.
At that time, I was working for the state of Wisconsin Department of revenue. I enjoyed that very much. My supervisors and coworkers seemed to enjoy my company. My supervisors encouraged me to apply to work there through the civil service system, but I was a little hesitant. Several people warned me that once hired, a person could get assigned to virtually anywhere in the state. I wasn’t sure about following that route, so I waited for a notice from Milwaukee County. I received one not long after interviewing with the nice man from Milwaukee County.
I got a letter from a supervisor named Jack. He worked at the Department of Social Services. His letter told me that my name was on an eligibility list for the position of account clerk I. I was delighted to hear from him as my job with the state of Wisconsin was only temporary part-time. The post with Milwaukee County was full time with benefits. I proceeded to make an appointment with Jack at his office on 12th and Vliet St.
The building on 12th and Vliet was a former department store that was purchased by Milwaukee County some 25 years earlier. No remodeling or updating had ever taken place; the Department of Social Services simply moved in and set up operations. Before that, the department was squeezed in at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Jack's office was in the basement of the building. The building was in the middle of the ghetto, a high crime area with security guards posted throughout the building, and even in the parking lots. The kind of neighborhood where employees walked no farther than they could see the building. The type of area where someone might push a dead naked woman from a car into the street. That happened right across from the building one day during work hours. It was the kind of area where someone might stand outside on his front porch and fire his rifle into the air to scare away pedestrians. That happened one day when I was outside during a smoke break. It did clear out the parking lot pretty quickly, though. If you did walk more than a block away from the building, you were in a kind of criminal, no man's land, and anything was possible.
The interview date came, and I went, and I met with Jack, whose last name I will not say. He doesn't work there any longer as he retired some time ago, but other people that I talk about might still work there, so I think it's prudent not to use last names. Jack was there with a woman whose name was Vera. I didn't know what she was doing there as she just stared at me blankly and then mumbled a few things to Jack. After a brief interview, I left, and then not long may be several days after, Jack offered me a position.
I was so delighted I immediately accepted. I went to work at my state job and gleefully told them that I was quitting to go work for Milwaukee County.
Well, my supervisors were not happy; they were quite upset that I was leaving because they wanted me to apply to work for the state. I told them this was for a sure opportunity.
I couldn't understand why they were so upset that I was leaving. They told me that I was wasting my time to go work for Milwaukee County. In retrospect, I realize they were right. I should have stayed, but how could I have known. It was an opportunity, I thought, and it had excellent benefits, so I gave my two weeks’ notice.
Two weeks went by, and it came time to report for my new job on 12th and Vliet. It was February, and it was a cold, dark, cloudy, and miserable rainy day. The building was so drab; it looked so depressing, especially from a distance. I hadn’t noticed before. As I drove up, I saw the windows were boarded up, probably because of the riots back in the 1960s. The parking lot had a high fence and guard towers. I wondered if I should just turn around and go back to work for the state. I thought about that, but in the end, I decided I had to go with a sure thing, so I parked and went inside.
My office was in the basement, as was Jack's office. I reported to the office where I worked to discover that the woman at the interview, Vera was the supervisor. The name of the section/department I was to work in was called Financial Resources. Jack was the real supervisor, but he was getting old and didn't want to supervise anymore. Jack had worked for Milwaukee County for some 35 years already and was waiting to get out. He was passing on his duties to whoever would take them, and Vera was one of those people.
So began a quite peculiar relationship as I would find out in the weeks and months ahead.
Vera was a fairly miserable, mean, flatulent little woman who just didn't seem to get as much out of life as she had hoped. She was married and had children, and she was always willing to engage me in conversations about her family, but she would never offer me any advice on how to do my work.
Vera showed me my desk, and I sat down. The first thing I noticed was that there was a pile of paper about 6 inches thick across the top of my new desk. I had no idea what to do with it. Vera brought me a stack of manuals and said, ‘I don't know anything about your job’ and walked away. I had no idea what to do, so I sat at the desk and smoked cigarettes. Vera’s desk was right next to mine, so I had to deal with her, but she wouldn't tell me how to do anything. She was willing to engage in conversation as long as it had nothing to do with work. Her desk also was piled up with paper, but even more, like a snowball fort. It was in a semi-circle. I guess it was a shield for some imaginary enemy.
‘Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Well, Vera was paranoid, and they were out to get her. Two other women that didn't seem to know any more than I did also worked in the department. Vera didn't seem to like them either.
So, the days went by, and I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes at my desk as it was allowed at the time. Vera kept complaining to Jack that she was not going to train me even though she was supposed to. As it turned out, there was a lot of drama with the previous person who had my position, and his name was Roger. Vera loved Roger, but he left to get promoted. Vera was so sad that he left, but he was gone, and she didn't want me, she wanted Roger.
Finally, Jack realized that he would have to get someone to show me what to do, so he contacted the training supervisors for welfare caseworkers and decided I should go to training. I would receive training as a caseworker that didn't have a lot to do with my job, but nobody seemed to know what else to do, and Vera wasn’t going to budge. Over time I began to realize that nobody else understood what Vera did either.
She wouldn’t tell anybody anything about anything. She would sit at her desk and work on ‘statements of assistance.’
I was sent away for training that went on for several weeks. I was glad to get it, but as I was to discover over time, job training was mostly self-taught. All of Milwaukee County operated this way as far as I could tell. People learned their job as they went along. The positions are usually rather unique, so there isn't an equivalent in the private sector or anywhere else. People had to learn their jobs without any assistance whatsoever. I did get one bit of news that made my day. One of the training supervisors, Pat, had me complete a mock welfare application and submit it for review. I did as instructed, and Pat told me afterward that the application I completed went through the system without any errors
detected. He said that was the only time he had witnessed such an event. He was so impressed he told Jack.
The basement of the 12th and Vliet building contained caseworkers and office workers and Sheriff's deputies. I eventually discovered that my job was to work on welfare fraud cases. The sheriffs would bring welfare fraud cases, and it was up to me to try to figure out how much money people owed. Vera's job was to get notified by a department called the Securities Division who would ask her to research old cases. She would check to see if somebody owed money from early welfare programs that were in operation dating back to the 1920s. She would go through old dusty, musty, paper folders, and she would dig out notices and figure out how much money people owed.
After a person had passed away, a worker from the Securities Division would send that person's name to Vera. Vera would check to see if that person owed any money, then she would write a statement and send it to the securities division. The Securities Division would send the report to the person's estate. It often didn't go over very well for families to find out that their parents or relatives were on welfare during the Great Depression, but that's what the job entailed. The problem was, there was no adjustment for inflation, so if somebody received five dollars’ worth of assistance back in 1932, for instance, they were billed for that exact amount even 50 years later. Vera would frequently spend a week or more on individual cases, going through old records. She got paid about $10 an hour plus benefits. Vera might spend a week, and Milwaukee County would pay her over $400 in wages plus benefits for her to prepare a statement saying someone owed maybe
$25 from 50 years earlier. There wasn't a lot of logic to Vera’s job. I think that was the reason why she was so secretive as it gave her job security.
The job that I had entailed going through welfare records and trying to figure out how much money people owed—most of the cases related to unreported wages. People would not tell their caseworkers that they were working, and eventually, they would get caught, usually, sometimes. Then the cases would find a way to the sheriff’s fraud squad, and then they would send the case to me, and I would try to figure out how much money they owed. Since I was brand-new on the job, it was kind of a guess at first to figure out how much money people owed.
Most of the cases that the sheriffs gave me were for clients that weren't eligible for any assistance anyways. It meant that they had to pay all the money back to the County. But some people had to go to court sometimes and sometimes they went to prison for welfare fraud. There were several cases where I had to figure the amount owed to determine the client’s prison sentence by the judge and district attorney. Situations like that made me a bit nervous since I was usually figuring out things as I went along.
The two coworkers I had were in the same situation as me. Carol and Regina were their names, and they never seemed to understand what it was that they were supposed to do.
Vera wouldn’t tell them any more than me, although Vera did complain about both of them to me for some reason. Both Carol and Regina did have colorful histories. Carol was a former suburban mother whose father was involved in some kind of shady
dealings, which required the family to have an armed bodyguard at all times when she was a child. Eventually, Carol married a man who became very successful in business and then dumped her and the kids. That was how Carol ended up working for Milwaukee County. Regina was also a divorced mother, and she had a drug-dealing brother nicknamed “king tut” who had a penchant for torturing his rivals.
Across the room from us were a group called the home visitors. They would spend their days driving around the county, visiting people who couldn’t come into the office. They were older, more experienced workers who put their eccentricities on display for us nearly every day. Behind my desk was a room that had a sink that we used occasionally that would give us a surprise one summer. Most of our workspace contained file cabinets that Vera had filled up with useless records. I discovered over time that Vera was a little fountain of knowledge when she was in a good mood.
Vera claimed that the people who were running the Department of Social Services weren't using money from title programs for proper purposes. Title programs refer to things like Medicare, which is title 18 and Medicaid, which is title 19. She claimed, among other things, that title money went to buy Milwaukee Buck’s basketball tickets. There were entries on a computer printout showing the purchases of Bucks basketball tickets. She also made an interesting claim about the General Assistance program, which no longer exists.
The program required people to work at a recycling company. Vera claimed that the county executive and at least one county supervisor, and I think, one of the county department heads owned the company in secret.
She claimed that the General Assistance program would force these people to work at the recycling company, but then the owners of the company got to keep the money that was generated by the labor from the clients. The money didn't go back to Milwaukee County; it went to the people who owned the company, which was the county executive and his friends. She also claimed that they changed the name of the company, which was a corporation every year. Vera knew that because she said she went to the library every year to look at the list of corporations in Wisconsin. She had a list of corporation names that were used over the years and even showed it to me. Vera claimed they did this to throw off anyone that might try to investigate like a newspaper or TV station. She claimed that these guys were getting rich off of that General Assistance program because they were getting free labor for recycling, and then they got to keep the money.
Vera knew all kinds of neat little tidbits like that. Sometimes I wondered if that was the reason why she got stuck in the job she had. Vera was a supervisor, but at the lowest pay range possible. Maybe the reason why she got stuck in the basement was nobody liked her because she spent her days investigating people for no apparent reason. Hardly anyone seemed to like Vera, and it showed.
Adjacent to our workspace separated by a temporary wall was the inactive records department. Whenever Vera or I would request old records from this department, we would have to wait as long as three days because Vera didn’t get along with the supervisor. Vera claimed it had to do with race as at least one of the employees in that
department wanted to work in Vera’s department, but Vera and Jack wouldn’t let them. Unqualified Vera claimed.
Another department that caused us problems was a computer department that did all of the data entry. This department provided us with printouts of benefits paid to clients, which we needed to prepare our statements. One of those people wanted to work in Vera’s department as well but didn’t get hired. Not qualified again, Vera said. The result was that when we asked for printouts of benefits, we would have to wait up to a week. It was due to the data entry operator not liking us Vera claimed. There was nothing we could do about it. Vera claimed it all had to do with race because the people not hired were a minority and were quick to file grievances.
I think the most disgusting part of my job was working on cases from the old-age assistance program. It was a side job that Vera dumped on me. The old-age assistance program was in operation in Milwaukee County up until about the 1950s. By the 1960s, there were programs like Social Security and SSI to fill the void. How the old-age assistance program generally worked was if someone was old or disabled and they could not provide for themselves any longer, they would apply to Milwaukee County. The caseworker would interview the person and figure out how much money they needed, but then they would also force the person to give up something of sentimental and real value.
The idea was to force someone to give up some token items to ensure they paid back the assistance they received. Gold watches, for instance, or a pearl necklace or maybe a diamond wedding ring or ivory comb set or something along those lines—all kinds of really unique family heirloom type items. People had to give these up to the caseworker to qualify for the program. The caseworker would make a note of the object taken from the client and then turn the item over to the Securities Division. The Securities Division had a large safe out at the county grounds where they stored all of these items.
The problem that developed over time was no one knew what to do with the items. The old-age assistance clients had long since passed away. Milwaukee County didn’t want to broadcast the fact it had forced these people to give up these items of value. It was, by any measure, a tacky thing to do. I do recall one case in particular that Vera gave me. The person was born when Abraham Lincoln was president and had died in the 1950s before I was even born. Unfortunately for him, he resided in Milwaukee County in his time of need. His case then sat for more than 30 years after he died before anyone (me) worked on it.
Vera’s job and mine sometimes were to go through these old-age assistance files and find out how much money people owed to Milwaukee County. That value of the item and the amount owed were entered in a county ledger somewhere, and the file or account was then closed. Vera claimed the money made from the sale of the items disappeared. I do wonder from time to time what happened to all of the items in that safe. It was supposedly
quite a large safe, according to Vera, and I’m sure that whatever was in there was worth quite the fortune for someone.
The saddest part about that particular program was that the caseworkers of the day had to come up with a synopsis of the person's life and put it into writing: so much grief and anguish and sorrow condensed onto a county-issued index card. The caseworker would write a summary of the person's life. Each one would describe in such concise and efficient detail how things had taken such terrible turns for people, how they had lost so much, and ruined by some cruel twist of fate like the economy or ill health.
It was quite tragic reading through the cards because most of the people lost everything, and it all happened at the same time during the Great Depression. There were thousands of these summary cards filling up the file cabinets, all containing variations of the same story. People just kept trying to hang on, but whatever they did, it was never enough.
They weren't able to regain any of their wealth or their bank accounts or their homes, and they ended up living in rooming houses and such. It’s quite sad to think of what an emotional toll it was to lose everything and then have to apply for assistance.
Besides the indignity of applying for welfare, they had to give up something of value to the caseworker. Perhaps it was the last thing of value that they had in their possession.
They were supposed to get back at some point the item they had given to the
caseworker. But the money was rarely if ever never paid back, and eventually, the program closed out as the Social Security and SSI programs took over. There were thousands of these unresolved cases left over from the old-age assistance program. I don’t know what became of them.
As the days and weeks went by, I began to settle into a routine. I even ventured outside from time to time, but I learned not to walk too far away from the building. It was in the middle of a high crime area. I also had to learn to watch where I walked around the building. I was required to walk the facility to obtain paperwork and documents.
However, I discovered through Vera that many minorities in the building were watching me. Many of the minorities that worked in the building did not like me for whatever reason. Vera claimed it had to do with race.
About the time that I started, another young white guy also started who was about my age. His hiring was covered in the local newspaper at the time because it was kind of scandalous. The guy’s father was a Milwaukee County supervisor, and this county supervisor had approached one of the managers in the Department of Social Services and asked him to get his son a job which the manager did. The county supervisor’s son got a temporary position in the photo ID booth on the first floor of the building.
Unfortunately for him, that put him in contact with the public, which meant he had to deal with mostly minorities who didn't like white people. I was cautioned by several white people who came to our department for the record’s research to watch out. The problem was the minorities in the department couldn’t tell us apart. They couldn’t tell
the difference between two white guys. When the photo ID guy would leave his post to go on break or something, minority workers would see him and complain to some manager that I wasn’t at my desk. Conversely, if I left my office to get a file from another department, minority workers would see me and would complain about the photo ID guy.
Vera confirmed this to me since she was considered a supervisor and was privy to such information through Jack. The situation did get rather ugly over time. It got so bad that one of the welfare clients went so far as to wait for the white guy from the photo ID booth at the employee entrance so she could hassle him as he left work. The client was allowed onto the employee parking lot by employees so she could wait for the white guy.
The supervision knew all about this and did absolutely nothing about it. Vera claimed that supervisors, who at the time were generally white males, were afraid to take any action against minorities for fear of lawsuits and bad press. As proof of that, she told me a story about one of the accountants in the building who came down on occasion to our department to do research. He moved to America from Africa and gotten a job with Milwaukee County in Vera’s department.
Shortly after starting in Vera’s department, there was a job announcement for an accountant. What this guy did, was wait until all the other interested people had applied for and took the civil service exam for the job, the result of which was an eligibility list
of qualified applicants. While the accounting supervisor was in the middle of the interview process with those on the eligibility list, the black guy from Vera’s department filed a union grievance claiming discrimination. Vera said the Social Service Department supervisors were so terrified of getting sued that they threw away the eligibility list and gave the black guy the job. The big problem, though, was that since the position was promotional, the applicants were supposed to have a certain amount of skill and knowledge which this guy just didn’t have, and eventually, he quit.
Right about the time I started, the county board decided to remodel the building, but they didn’t make much in the way of accommodations for the employees. It meant that the building turned into a construction zone while I worked there. Our office, as well as others around the building, began to fill up with dust clouds and construction noise so loud that we couldn’t hear people who called us on the phone.
At one point, there was quite a bit of welding going on in the building, which was visible to many welfare clients and their kids. Many of the children would stare intently at the welding light, which is akin to looking directly at the sun. I wonder how many of those kids grew up with lousy eyesight without knowing why. Of course, the County Board and the social service managers made sure that the top bosses got out of the building before the work started. The administration staff went to Schlitz Park before the dust flew.
While the construction work went on, I had to learn my job. The sheriff’s detectives who were investigating welfare fraud cases were frequent visitors and levelheaded for the most part. The sheriff guards on the other hand didn't seem to have a temperament for anything, and that's why they were in the building. How they got hired was anyone's guess. The sheriffs were the security force for Milwaukee County buildings. They always seemed to enjoy tormenting the rank and file, almost like a sport. One day during construction, one of the hallways from the employee entrance was to close in the morning.
After I walked into the employee entrance that morning, I walked down to the end of the hall. A sheriff was standing there along with a woman from the Human Resources department. As I approached, the sheriff grabbed the security gate and pushed it as hard as he could across the width of the hallway and slammed it closed right in front of me. He nearly hit me with the gate (seriously), and then he stood there and smiled at me, and the woman from Human Resources burst into laughter and walked away. I had to turn around and walk the length of the building to look for a different way.
It was my first encounter with one of the psycho sheriffs, but it wasn’t the last. I heard stories from Vera about other sheriff’s deputies that were kicked out of the building by petition. Employees drew up petitions and signed them by the hundred to get rid of individual sheriff deputies because they were so crazy and mean. There was one who eventually became a Lieutenant in charge of the fraud squad. His office, though, was at
the county jail blocks away. It wasn’t an oversight. He had worked in the welfare office previously but was kicked out of the building by petition.
According to Vera, he had taken someone that he didn't like who was already in handcuffs into the public men’s room in the basement. That bathroom was just down the hall from our office. He then proceeded to beat the man with his nightstick while other deputies guarded the door. Vera told me that he left the bathroom covered with blood. I said to her that statement was a little too dramatic, but she swore it was true. Vera said that she and other staff went into the men's room after the sheriff left, and they were horrified by how much blood was splattered all over the walls, so they came up with a petition to have that sheriff deputy removed from the building.
I avoided this bathroom whenever possible, anyways. It had a concrete sink in the corner.
The entire basin against the wall on one side had what looked like groin hairs stuck into boogers that were attached to the wall leading up from the sink. I didn’t even notice at first. The building was open to the public so people would come in and use the restrooms.
Some people would take off their clothes to bathe in the sink, which was big enough.
Others needed to get out their artistic urges, I guess, and arrange boogers on the edge of the sink and stick groin hairs into them. I’m not sure what was more disgusting, that someone was constructing a booger mural on the bathroom wall or that the janitors never cleaned the bathroom. I soon found it easier to use the employee bathroom instead.
Vera talked about another sheriff deputy who was a landlord on the side. He came up with a trick where he would get notified by caseworkers if one of his tenants who owed him money would show up. The sheriff's deputy would then confront the clients while they were trying to get their food stamps and other assistance. He would badger them for money right in the office. Eventually, he was kicked out of the building as well.
I’m not sure why but, as time went by, Vera let me know that because I was a white man, I had no career potential. I don’t know why she took it upon herself to inform me of this.
Maybe, Vera was bored or just bitter, who knows. She made sure to explain things to let me know how the system worked. She pointed out to me on the county job announcements that circulated through the office, a notation at the top of the form. It stated that all county hiring was subject to a court decision that passed some years earlier.
I didn't know what it meant, but Vera claimed that the human resources department wouldn't hire anyone basically unless they were minority or female because they just weren't hiring white males anymore. She thought that was funny. She also thought it hilarious that somehow the department was able to say that the workforce had a balance between male and female and white and black and Mexican and Puerto Rican etc. when it wasn’t.
Vera started there in the 1970s. At that time, there were near riots in the building.
Minorities and women were protesting against the old white guys. Regina had also started about the same time. Regina and Vera told me stories of how there were numerous bomb threats called into the building. Each time that happened, the sheriff deputies would make
everyone leave the building for an hour or two while they searched the building.
Eventually, the employees started calling in bomb threats, usually on Fridays around 2:00
p.m., which was around break time for many. Employees would then leave for the day because they knew that by the time the sheriff had finished searching the building, it was time to go home. Anyways, lawsuits were filed all through the ’70s until the minority/women groups won.
The result was that Milwaukee County had to hire anyone but white guys to balance out the workforce to correct the perceived injustice. The purpose of the lawsuits overall was to put all of the various groups on equal footing with the evil white men. Unfortunately, for people like Vera, the court orders, and other actions taken behind the scenes made some groups more equal than others. For instance, non-whites, as well as women, were given preference in hiring and promotions, but they weren’t identical. Blacks but no other groups had sudden seniority adjustments that had the effect of backdating their seniority.
It meant that in some cases, before they even worked for Milwaukee County, even back to when they turned 18 no matter their age when they started with Milwaukee County. It had something to do with black people not applying because of perceived racism. As in there aren’t any black people working here, so why bother asking. I don’t know how the policy worked since there was nothing in writing that anyone could show. It was better to keep systems like this away from the public eye. Else, I’m sure the media would have had a field day with that. Black women had a preference over black men because they were women. Black women had preference over white women because even though they were both women, black had preference over white. Blacks had priority over other minority
groups. It was just something that was done much to the chagrin of people like Vera and other white women that I heard complain. It started with the county stopping the hiring of white guys. It was never an official policy, but it was the way things happened for the most part.
The discipline policy was also adjusted, according to Vera. That meant that no disciplinary action was ever taken against blacks at all. It wasn’t worth it for management. It wasn’t worth the aggravation. Most of the managers were old white guys, and they knew that if they did take action against a minority in general or a black, in particular, it would lead to negative press. It might also result in legal problems for the department. The federal court orders weighed heavily on the department and still do now. The result was that the blacks, especially and the other minority groups, were treated like toddlers. Whatever they did, no matter what they did, it didn't matter. The quality of work dropped like a rock and never recovered.
Luckily, I worked in the basement, but whenever I had to go out into the other parts of the building, I felt like a foreigner in a strange land. I think I was the only white guy under 40 in the entire building besides the county supervisor’s son. Eventually, his appointment came to an end, and he left. Then it was just me. Most of the other white guys were old and had their own offices. I wasn’t so lucky.
Vera let me know in no uncertain terms that the only reason I got hired was because of the Milwaukee County disability program where I had applied. She claimed there were two
other applicants that she and Jack interviewed, but one was missing an arm, and the other one walked with crutches. It meant that neither of them could carry file folders or workaround file cabinets, so Vera didn’t want them. I only used a cane that took one hand, which meant I had free use of the other to carry folders, and she claimed that was the only reason I got hired. The other two guys interviewed were employed in different departments and then got fired before their probation ended.
I don’t know why, but Vera signed up for an affirmative action committee and talked me into it as well. The only advantage was that we got to take off work and go to different departments and attend meetings. The meetings had absolutely no value whatsoever, but periodically we were given reports that showed the number of people working in the Social Services department. These reports always made Vera’s day. The reports showed the breakdown by race and by gender, and somehow, they were able to show that there was an even balance even though there wasn't. Vera regularly commented that there was a kind of paranoia amongst the county managers who were fearful of repercussions if the public found out they had stopped hiring white guys.
Amidst all of this drama, another event occurred that seems to put everything in perspective for me. One day in the summer, it was raining. Lightly in the morning, but then got heavy and stayed that way for many hours. By about 2:00 pm, the toilets and sinks and bubblers began overflowing with human waste and toilet paper and anything else that could fit through the pipes. Even the sink behind our office overflowed, yuck.
The whole building became an open sewer, which seemed appropriate. It did compliment
the booger motif thing going on in the bathroom, though. Although, as Vera pointed out, my career was at a standstill, the county did offer excellent health insurance. I was able to have my hip replaced at almost no cost. After I recovered, I signed up for night school and put in for a transfer with human resources. The rest of the county wasn’t this bad was it I wondered, well yes it was I discovered, but I tried to stay optimistic.
I began receiving notices from various departments with openings for account clerk I, which was my job title. I was finally able to get a transfer opening at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex. The supervisor's name was Jeff. He was a few years older than me, and he supervised the accounts receivable office.
He had approximately a dozen people working for him. He and the other staff seemed ordinary enough, but eventually, I discovered that all I had done was a transfer from one circus to another. There was a whole new carnival of characters that I would encounter, and I don’t mean patients. At times I was reminded of the Edgar Allen Poe story about the visitor to a mental hospital who discovers that the patients had taken over the hospital and locked up the staff.
My job duties were as ambiguous as my job duties at the Department of Social Services. Jeff told me that my job was to work with other account clerks and clerk typists. Outpatient billing was the goal of the section I was in, but we never seemed to get much of that done. For no particular reason that anyone knew of, the county grounds, including the Mental Health Complex, created its computer network. I had heard about this about a year earlier when I was in a computer training program at the Department of Social Services.
Someone, no one knew who, had decided it was better if the county grounds had their own computer system. There was nothing wrong with the existing system, but someone didn’t like it. The problem was that the new computer
center, located in the Medical College, wasn’t big or fast enough. When I say it wasn’t fast, I mean that when I or anyone would press enter on the computer keyboard, the system would lock up for up to 10 minutes or more at a time. It meant that if I was trying to research a patient account, I could easily spend a half-day or more waiting for the screen to change after pressing enter each time. Everyone from the clerk typists to the administrator’s had the same problem. It went on from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm five days a week. Staff all over the county grounds were assigned overtime to compensate for this. I often had to come in early or work late or on weekends just to get work done. Not extra work, I mean the regular work I couldn’t get done during the week because of the slow computer system. Of course, I had no idea this problem even existed, and Jeff, the supervisor, neglected to mention it during my interview.
It was against this backdrop that I began working at the Mental Health Complex.
My coworkers were two black women, Alice and Rosemary. It’s significant to note their race because they couldn’t tell white people apart. I know that because Alice told me so. She and Rosemary were always confusing me with Jeff. Kind of like the situation at the Social Services building with the county supervisor’s son. Alice and Rosemary did agree to help me learn my job, or so they told me.
Eventually, I realized they just liked jerking me around. They would take turns giving me instructions and then contradict themselves and each other. They got off on that. After about a week went by, I realized Alice and Rosemary weren’t
going to show me anything of value. I had to learn my job from scratch, kind of like in the Social Services Department. Jeff, the supervisor, was also quite useless in providing any information I discovered. Jeff was an account clerk himself at one time and got promoted to supervisor, somehow. His only talent was withholding information from me as Alice and Rosemary did. Maybe he got that from Alice and Rosemary, who knows. He was one of the most paranoid people I’d ever met or worked with, including Vera.
Initially, Jeff worked in the office with all of us account clerks. He wasn’t able to give me much help as he had not done that type of work for some time, according to Alice and Rosemary. Shortly after hiring me, Jeff got his own office. After that, he was mostly unreachable even when I could get into his office. He had a regular desk with chairs for guests, but he purposely kept the guest chairs up against his desk. This way, no one could sit down and had to stand in front of his office desk. Like school children, I suppose.
Jeff seemed to get increasingly paranoid after he got his own office. Since he was a supervisor, he was no longer in the union and subject to different rules.
He had worked his way up from the Union and had some protection for that.
However, people that were hired as supervisors or administrators directly from the outside had no protection at all. They were subject to termination at will.
They worked on a contract, usually six months to two years. It helped to add
to the paranoia that seemed to permeate the administrative and supervisory staff.
No one would help anyone because everyone was afraid of getting fired.
Many times, I would catch one of the bosses staring at the billing staff (us) through the window. The whole billing office that I worked in had glass walls. Around that entire office were smaller offices separated by a hallway.
Occupants of those offices and occasionally others with nothing else to do would stand and stare at us for hours on end through the windows. The patients wandering the mental health complex always seemed so ordinary in comparison.
Before I left my job at 12th and Vliet, several people told me to watch out for Eileen. I was even warned by several of my new coworkers to watch out for her.
She was off of work my first day, but I soon found out she was the warhorse of the office and Jeff’s alter ego. She kept control of all of the office machines and computer terminals, and she did not like to share—woe to the person who would dare touch one of ‘her’ computer terminals. I made the mistake of using a Medicaid terminal my first day to check a patient’s eligibility. Alice and Rosemary told me that Eileen would come after me if she caught me using the computer terminal without her permission. Oops, too late. When Eileen came back to work, she gave me the evil eye to put me on notice, I guess.
The computer terminals that she had control over she used for sending bills by computer directly to the insurance companies. They were separate from the county computers. Since we couldn’t use Eileen’s terminals, we had to do our work manually. The slow computer system I mentioned previously made it impossible to get it done timely. Between Jeff’s paranoia and Eileen’s territorial attitude, the other clerks and I did not get much work done at all. It was just the opposite.
Jeff came up with the goofiest projects for us. One, in particular, I remember quite well as we had to do it monthly. Stacks of outpatient bills for submission to Medicaid and Medicare and private insurance companies came into our office.
The bills printed on multi-layer carbon paper that had perforations (holes) on each side. Someone was supposed to feed the stacks of paper into a computer printer. Then get fed into another machine that would tear off the perforations and separate the pages. Instead, we had to tear off the perforated edges and separate the pages, for every single bill, by hand. There were tens of thousands of these bills sent to our office each month. A white cloud of paper dust would form overhead in the office each month that would take several days to dissipate.
After the paper was separated and divided up amongst the staff, we would set to work filling in the spaces on the forms. Of course, we could have used computers and printers to automate these tasks to cut down on time, but it didn’t
happen. Jeff’s paranoia stopped any progress to that end. Jeff did have a manual on his desk filled up with a wish list of office procedures that were supposed to get automated someday. The problem was that he needed to have control of everything, but his understanding of things only went so far. If he didn’t understand how it worked, then he would not use it or allow it. This need for control had its price, though. A few years after I left the department, I heard that Jeff had a stroke. Jeff was like a real-life master control program, and I guess he finally fried his circuit board.
Although the account clerks and clerk typists were busy all day every day, not much got done. A big problem we ran into was that insurance companies usually have a time limit on how long a provider can wait to submit a bill for services. The time limit varied from 30 days and up. Whatever the time limits were, we usually missed, and the invoice did not get paid. We would still do the paperwork and submit the bills. It made Jeff feel better and look good to his boss, but the insurance companies would reject the claims.
The need for control extended to the breaks and lunches as well as Jeff took precisely 15 minutes for a break and 35 minutes for lunch. That by itself isn’t unusual, but he did that even during the holidays. On occasion, we would have a luncheon and order food in. We only did this for special events, but we still had to eat fast and race back to our desks. No matter the holiday or amount of food,
we still had precisely 35 minutes. Jeff even made Eileen and her minions set up the tables and food during their morning breaks.
One of Jeff’s favorite things to do, I think, was to disseminate memos and bulletins that came through the office nonstop. He would never let anyone look at any memo or insurance bulletin in its entirety. He would go through and take out only the parts he wanted individual staff to see. Depending on the memo or bulletin and who he wanted to send it to, he might only send a page or part of a page. He would copy specific details and even use a marker to block out what he didn’t want someone to see.
Jeff could take 50-page memos or bulletins and reduce them down to one paragraph or even a few lines and then distribute it. By the time he sent them out to us, they were nearly incoherent. I always thought his approach was rather comical since many of the memos and bulletins were from Medicaid and Medicare and accessible by the public anyways. But control freaks need their fix. Jeff kept his staff close, and his paperwork closer.
When Jeff finally did send out one of his precious memos, he made sure to attach an employee list if the message was going to more than one person. This way, as the announcement was passed around and read by each person on the list, they would check off their names. After circulation, it went back to Jeff for filing. Yes, he kept them. He was probably the only supervisor in Milwaukee
County to do this. It did backfire on him once, though. I missed the event since I was off work that day. One of the clerk typists told me when I returned that another of the clerk typists had filed a grievance alleging discrimination.
There were only three clerk typists. Two were on the job for a while and were white, and the other clerk typist had just started, and she was black. One of Jeff’s typically useless, confusing, pointless memos was making its way around the office. One of the white clerk typists was looking at the message when the black one told her she wanted to see it next. The white clerk typist decided to jerk her around and instead passed the memo to the other white clerk typist. The black clerk typist then filed a discrimination grievance against the white clerk typist.
As one of the white clerk typists was telling me this, the local union steward and chief union steward and the union president all entered the office together to see Jeff. I was stunned. To get all of these people involved for such a stupid accusation, although nothing came of it, made me wonder about the priorities of the union.
Maybe Vera wasn’t too far off after all since all three of the union people were black. In all fairness, though, the white clerk typists were very deserving of the grievance. They wasted a good deal of their time talking about boyfriends they would never marry and what color underwear they would wear to work the next day. They annoyed the black clerk typist the same way Alice and Rosemary liked to annoy me. At least the black clerk typist could complain. All I could do
was take it, or quit and I just needed the money too much to leave. Alice, Rosemary, and Jeff went out of their way to make many of my days as miserable as possible.
Alice and Rosemary’s favorite thing was to turn up the heat in the office whenever I turned my back. The office would turn into a virtual sauna. The temperature was in the 90’s most of the time. They finally had to stop after another worker, a woman, of course, complained to the office director, another woman. Jeff’s favorite thing to do was to give me instructions and then contradict himself. Sometimes he even gave me written instructions for projects and later claimed I did it wrong. He was even worse than Alice and Rosemary.
Although the behavior of the staff was bizarre at times, that conduct was matched or even surpassed by people calling and visiting the office. People would call the office and try to get information about patients. People were always trying to assume a patient’s identity, either in person or over the phone.
Friends, neighbors, and relatives of patients were forever trying to get information from us. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, but no one seemed to care.
An even bigger problem was that the Mental Health Complex and the Medical Complex up the road shared the same computer system. It wasn’t uncommon for patients of the Medical Complex to have their bill and registration information sent to us by mistake. The admission clerks at the Medical Complex would enter
the wrong code, for instance, and suddenly the patient would receive a bill from the Mental Health Complex. Those patients would then call us and complain that they were never at the Mental Health Complex. To aggravate the problem, many of the real Mental Health Complex patients would also contact us and complain that they were never at the Mental Health Complex either.
These episodes made for some pretty strange days and just added to the paranoia.
I couldn’t even leave anything on my desk when I left work each day. The janitorial staff would rip us off whenever possible. They would go into Jeff’s office and take office and desk keys and go through our office desk by desk. One of the account clerks in the inpatient billing section had $600.00 and some personal items stolen from her locked desk over a weekend.
After about 18 months of this, I put in for a transfer to Human Resources. I wasn’t quite sure how to sum up my experience at the Mental Health Complex.
But it was an experience I wouldn’t want to repeat. There wasn’t much fanfare with my departure. I’m not sure that Alice and Rosemary even knew I was gone since they thought I was Jeff most of the time. As Alice liked to tell me, all, you white people look the same to me. My new job was at the courthouse downtown.
I was interviewed for my new job in the Department of Child Support Enforcement by the supervisor Lois. She then introduced me to Andy, who was the assistant director.
Lois was a charming and competent person. I think her in-depth knowledge of the department gave her an advantage that helped to create a low-stress environment. She didn’t have to hide under piles of paper like Vera or hide memos in her office like Jeff.
That was in contrast to the assistant director Andy who also was very pleasant but probably got his demeanor from not doing any work and staying in his office as much as possible. I worked in room G4, but the department itself took up three floors. Like the Department of Social Services and the Mental Health Complex, I noticed that most of the employees were women and minorities. I would soon discover that the same attitudes that I had encountered at the other two departments were alive and well at the courthouse as well.
Although Lois was quite civil to deal with, most of the employees in the office were not. Despite the animosity, my job at the courthouse was probably the most comical of my experiences working for Milwaukee County. Approximately 100 people were working in the department. Out of those approximate 100 employees, only about five were white guys like me. After starting, of course, I discovered a little secret. Lois had neglected to tell me that my position was replacing two jobs. That meant that I was replacing two people. Their names were Jim and Nona. Jim transferred to another department, and Nona got promoted but stayed in Child Support Enforcement.
Jim was black, which meant that my hiring had increased the white guy population by 20%. Vera would like that. Nona volunteered to train me, which I appreciated.
Unfortunately, training didn’t make that much difference. Since I was replacing two people, I had quite a bit of work to do. The job wasn’t that difficult, but the sheer volume of work was staggering at times. Whenever a welfare case in Milwaukee County would close, a report was created and sent to me. I had to verify child support information and then sign off on the statement and send it on to another department. I would receive thousands of these reports each month. However, the central part of the job I discovered was fielding phone calls from welfare recipients.
Each month I would receive a check register listing thousands of names and check amounts. The recipients would then call me, by the thousand, to find out if they would get a child support check that month. It seemed like a simple idea, but it rarely was.
Absent parents would send in their payments for child support to the Clerk of Court, also in the courthouse. The Clerk of Courts was supposed to apply the remittance to the proper accounts. That would generate a notice to the Social Service office in Madison.
They, in turn, would notify caseworkers of the payments. The caseworkers were then supposed to issue a payment to the recipient.
These payments were a bonus issued in addition to regular benefits. The idea was to give recipients a kickback from the child support payments made by the absent parents. It gave the welfare recipients an incentive to turn in the absent parent to Child Support
Enforcement. It certainly kept everyone busy. Putting all of these departments and people together into a workable system was a disaster. There were people assigned to locate absent parents who couldn’t find anyone. When found, the absent parents many times quit their jobs to avoid making payments. I even heard stories of absent parents who would join a circus. That way, they were always on the road and were paid in cash and could avoid making child support payments.
When payments did come in, it may or may not post to the right account. I discovered child support cases where the absent parent had made thousands of dollars in payments to the Clerk of Courts. The Clerk of Courts would then apply the remittance to the wrong account. Trying to get the Clerk of Courts to untangle these cases was a nightmare. If and when the proper payments were made and credited properly, that still wasn’t enough. The caseworkers were supposed to change codes on a computer to issue the child support payment to their client. Trying to get the caseworkers even to answer their phone was an accomplishment in itself. Then I had to convince them to issue the additional child support check. Usually, the caseworker just wasn’t interested. When that would happen, I would always make sure to tell the recipient that there was money on account for them. I would then make sure to tell them their caseworker was the reason they weren’t getting it.
I heard stories of recipients who would go to the welfare office and literally stamp their feet and jump up and down until their caseworker issued the child support check.
My cubicle was in the back of the office on the ground floor next to the windows. It was the third from the end. On one side of me was a woman named Mary, who seemed to spend most of her time trying to sign on to the computer system. The computer resource person assigned to our department even came down to find out what the problem was.
The computer system was keeping track of how many sign-on attempts Mary made. One day Mary had tried to sign onto her computer 50 times without success. At one point, Mary even spilled an entire cup of coffee across her keyword.
Next to her at the end was another worker whose name escapes me. The laundry at the county grounds had closed and laid off its employees, and she was one of them. The county Human Resources department had to find them work. Unfortunately, many of the former laundry employees got hired for their brawn and not their brains. Somehow, one of them ended up in Child Support Enforcement. Her classification changed from laundry worker to clerk-typist. She could barely read or write but given the job of sending court summons to absent parents. She would pick people out of the phone book almost at random and send them the court summons. Sometimes she got it right and sometimes not.
She was the cause of some angry callers and visitors to our office, wondering why they had gotten served with a court summons.
Across the aisle from her was Judy. She was a clerk typist also. I’m not sure what she did, but she had worked there long enough to know some pretty clever tricks. Initially, I wasn’t sure if anyone even worked in her cubicle. Nearly every time I walked past her
cubicle, it was empty. I did notice personal items on the desk, which indicated someone did work there. Finally, one day as I was walking past, I saw Judy on the floor crawling under her desk. I asked if she was ok and she replied she was. I noticed she had a pillow and blanket as well. I then realized she was just tucking herself in for a nap under her desk. The cubicles and the desks were designed for use together. The desk in each cubicle took up two walls of that cubicle. It meant there was plenty of space under the desk for nap time. I don’t mean to imply that Judy was always sleeping under her desk. Let's just say I knew where to find her if she wasn’t seated in her chair.
Next to Judy was Carlos. Carlos was the Latin gay man, and the ladies loved Carlos, Carlos was the object of all their deep and dark desires. The ladies just had to have him.
Next to my cubicle, on the other side, was Steve. Steve was the office drama queen, and knew it and didn’t mind everyone else knowing it as well. Since Steve’s cubicle was next to mine, he could stare wistfully at Carlos across the aisle. He stared at Carlos because Carlos was the Latin gay man, and Steve just had to have him. But alas Carlos was taken.
He was “married,” and he even had a wedding picture and a ring on his finger to prove it.
Carlos brought his wedding picture and displayed it for all to see. That picture and the wedding ring didn’t deter anyone. It made them want him even more because he was Carlos, the Latin gay man.
The women most infatuated with Carlos were the paralegals. They would come into his cubicle one at a time. It was always on the pretense of work. They would ease their way into his cubicle while Carlos sat at his computer. They would slowly slip behind his chair and lean back against the desk. This way, they could approach Carlos from the side. Then, as they would converse with Carlos, they would slowly begin to touch Carlos and push their body against his shoulder. Eventually, they would move their groin against his shoulder and begin to grind away. The paralegals would quickly forget why they were there, and their eyes would close. After grinding for several minutes, they would open their eyes and soon leave the cubicle. I’m pretty sure they climaxed most of the time.
Poor Carlos, the ladies just couldn’t stay away. Every time the paralegals would start grinding, Carlos would get this “o no, not again” look on his face. He seemed to hate it but didn’t know how to deal with it. I suspect his gayness mindset made it difficult to deal with these advances. But he was Carlos, the Latin gay man and the ladies just had to have him. Before Carlos moved across from me, he sat in another part of the office. Some of the paralegals would ‘come’ into my cubicle. Several of them tried to grind on me, but I wouldn’t let them. I would change the position in my chair or just move around so they couldn’t do their thing.
I mean, why should I have let them do that when they weren’t doing anything for me, especially with all the work I had to do. In between the paralegal's orgasms, Carlos told
me about his previous job in a bank. He said he had a woman boss who would call Carlos into her office. She would lock the door and then proceed to chase Carlos around her desk. Carlos had left that job to work for Milwaukee County. I’m sure the benefits offered by Milwaukee County were better than the bank anyways. Luckily for Carlos, Lois was very professional. At least he had that advantage, but he probably never expected the paralegals to ‘come’ after him.
I didn’t watch the paralegals directly as they ground on Carlos; my view was always through a reflection. My cubicle had something called a microfiche reader in addition to the county computer. I kept it in the corner of my desk. It was pure coincidence that I was able to watch the paralegals work on Carlos. I just happened to look up one day and noticed that I could see a reflection on the microfiche machine. I could see with great clarity what was going on across the aisle. The first couple of times the paralegals ‘came’
on Carlos's shoulder, I was in too much shock to do anything. I had never seen anything like it. The only way I can describe it was like happening upon two animals having sex. I didn’t want to stare, but I just couldn’t look away. It was weird and different and going on right across the aisle from me.
The novelty quickly wore off. I was swamped with work and never-ending phone calls while Carlos and his new friends were having fun. Or at least his new friends were. As time went on, I realized that the paralegals wouldn’t ‘come’ on Carlos if I was watching.
So, whenever I heard any noise across the aisle, I would stop what I was doing and stare
at whatever paralegal was humping Carlos. That was usually enough to make them stop but not always. After all, Carlos was the Latin gay man, and the ladies just had to have him. Poor Steve, he wanted Carlos too, but they had him outnumbered. The paralegals ran in a pack and had all graduated from Marquette University. They were in close with the lawyers in the office who also mostly went to Marquette. Steve didn’t have a chance.
Although Carlos was popular with the ladies, he wasn’t so good at his job. He had as much trouble signing on to his computer as Mary did. One day Lois had a talk with Carlos in his cubicle. Carlos just wasn’t keeping up, and Lois wanted to know why. I didn’t hear the whole conversation, but I did hear Carlos threaten to quit if his work duties didn’t change. It wasn’t too long after that Carlos got promoted. It was done entirely in secret. No job announcement whatsoever. One day he was just gone, and we heard he was working on the mezzanine. The mezzanine is the secret floor between the first and second floor of the courthouse. The mezzanine was off-limits to most of the staff unless they worked on that floor. They didn’t want visitors ever. I did manage to visit Carlos one day in his new office. He was having trouble with his computer and had asked for help. He had a private office, which was difficult to reach. Did the paralegals have something to do with his promotion? I’ll never know. But they now had Carlos all to themselves whenever they had that ‘urge.’
The paralegals had gotten promoted in secret as well. They started as legal interns through Marquette. Initially, they were paid about seven dollars an hour with no benefits.
One day I was browsing through a stack of public notices on a bulletin board in the public hallway on the first floor of the courthouse. Most everything done in the county is public record, and announcements are required, although I doubt many people read them.
One notice caught my attention. The lawyers in Child Support Enforcement had recommended to a county personnel committee to have the legal interns reclassified to paralegals. They got it. The committee said sure, and the legal interns had their salaries more than doubled overnight plus granted benefits.
Their job duties didn’t change. The job that they performed was more than easy, they had to fill out one form, and that’s why they had gotten paid so little, and the low wage was indicative of the job duties. All they had to do was fill out one form! Welfare recipients were called into the office so the legal interns could interview them. The interns/paralegals would ask for information about the absent parent and enter it on the form. They would then send it to other people in the office, which began the child support process. That was their entire job, which gave them plenty of time to visit with Carlos, not to mention twice the money for doing it. These girls certainly knew how to work their connections. One of the regulars to mine and then Carlos’s cubicle was Lisa Jo. Lisa Jo was named director of Child Support Enforcement and then county Human Services director, and then she got fired. I suppose the luck had to run out sooner or later.
All of the cunning and drama did take its toll. Court rules dictated the work that was required to establish paternity. The staff was required to adhere to time limits. But just like
the Mental Health Complex, it didn’t happen. At the Mental Health Complex, the problem had more to do with management and slow computers. The issues at Child Support Enforcement were a bit more complicated. If the paralegals didn’t get to satisfy their
‘urge’ or if Mary couldn’t sign on to her computer or if Judy didn’t wake up in time, the work wouldn’t get done timely. Then they would have to start all over again. At the Mental Health Complex, if the bills went to insurance companies after the due date, the bill was denied permanently. However, in Child Support Enforcement, the staff had to start over. The chief lawyer complained about that, claiming they were working on the same cases over and over again.
It was sometime after Carlos got promoted that Lois decided to retire. After she left, a cloud of weirdness seemed to envelop the office. Linda replaced Lois. Linda didn’t like me. I never knew why, but she just didn’t. Linda was kind of a taller, meaner, and more flatulent version of Vera with a shade of Eileen. She liked to stand outside my cubicle in the aisle and tell anyone who would listen that she was trying to eliminate my position. I had decided earlier that I wouldn’t transfer no matter what. I had applied for a promotional job and was on the eligibility list, so all I could do was wait. In the meantime, the weirdness meter just kept going up. Things seemed so normal when Lois was there. Her presence seemed to keep things from getting too far out of hand.
Once Carlos was promoted, it left his cubicle across from me vacant. Dana, a blond teenage girl on summer break between high school and college, took it over. Suddenly,
the male lawyers from the office were in her cubicle all the time. They were almost as bad as the paralegals, but at least they weren’t humping her. The lawyers were a peculiar breed, but one stood out. I don’t recall his name, but I do remember his wardrobe. It was unique. He showed up to work every day wearing work clothes. He looked like a plumber or heating technician. He wore the kind of clothes that someone might wear if they were working in a factory, for instance. He even had heavy-duty work boots to match. I don’t mean his clothes were dirty or anything. It’s just that he would show up to court looking like he was going to fix the plumbing or something.
One day he even asked to borrow my tie because he would get in trouble with a judge if he didn’t wear one in court. To look at this guy, you wouldn’t think he had ever worn a tie in his life. The welfare recipients that he represented in court could only cringe. The way the system worked was that once someone applied for welfare, they were required to cooperate in establishing paternity for their kid(s). That meant they had to, among other things, show up to court hearings to testify against the absent parent. Since the recipients had applied for welfare, it was apparent they couldn’t afford a real lawyer, so they were stuck with the county issue. The recipients would often call me to complain. I have no idea why. I couldn’t do anything about it. I guess they just needed to vent their frustration, and I was one of the few people in the office that answered the phone.
Who was in charge of this circus, also known as Child Support Enforcement, you might ask. Well, besides Andy, who seemed to stay in his office as much as possible, there was
Arlene. Arlene was the director of Child Support Enforcement, and she had an office as well that she rarely left. I heard the story on her from Jim, the guy that held one of the two positions I filled. At one time, Arlene was just another office clerk. She got into law school, though, and asked the then director of the department for a leave of absence, which he granted. She went to law school during the year and went back to work at Child Support Enforcement during the summer. The director even gave her full vacation credit each year. Until her last year of law school, things were fine. According to Jim, the director got spooked when he realized that Arlene might finish law school and denied her leave of absence for her last year of school. She appealed and won. She finished law school; the director got fired, and then she took his job. The local news even covered parts of the story at the time. If they only knew what else was going on there.
Fortunately, or so I thought at the time, my name came up on an eligibility list. I got a notice from a supervisor named George, who worked at the Milwaukee County Medical Complex in the fiscal department. George invited me out to the hospital for an interview to work in the cash application department and hired me. It was my only promotional job in 16 years of service, ouch. It only took Carlos about a year to get promoted, but alas, he was Carlos, the Latin gay man.
Over the years, I began to realize that each department was its own slice of hell. I discovered that my new job in the fiscal department at the Medical Complex, which cash application was a part of, was probably worse than most. My time there began uneventfully enough. The Medical Complex was at the county grounds, which was a farm long ago and purchased from a farmer back in the 1800s by Milwaukee County. The county board then went on a building spree that lasted for decades.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The buildings constructed over the years housed any number of mentally and physically ill, along with the elderly, orphans, and the poor. There were even mass pauper graves filled up with the throw away people of the day. I’m sure the founders of the institution grounds as it was also known meant well.
However, after meeting and talking with many people over the years that lived or worked on the grounds, I never got a good impression. Most of the county operations and buildings are gone now. Maybe it was bad karma for doing things like cutting off people’s legs to save on wood for coffins before they went into the ground.
The building where I would work was called the north annex or laundry building. It still had that laundry smell. The whole upstairs contained laundry equipment caked with cleaning chemicals and solvents. Someone put up cubicle walls in the downstairs and put in the desks and called it the fiscal department. On one side of the building was the billing and collections, and I worked on the other side. Quite a bit of turmoil would
develop at the hospital in the next few years. For the moment, though, things seemed fine.
George was the supervisor, and Delores was an account clerk in charge just like Vera was, uh oh. The supervisor over George was Bill, and he answered to the controller. The controller was the head of the fiscal department. The Medical Complex was in the midst of a rather significant transition from one computer system to another. As I was to learn, many of the employees and supervisors were not keeping up very well. Again, as I quickly learned, job training was nearly nonexistent. I had to learn my job from scratch and hopefully not screw up too much.
My predecessor Richard was still in the unit when I started, and he was kind enough to show me a few things about my new job before he left for promotion. So, it wasn’t too bad. To my amazement, I discovered that the computers were still slow. The Medical Complex was using the same system as the Mental Health Complex. The same computer vendor was still providing the same awful service. Things were so bad that the staff from the billing department came in as early as 4 a.m. to start work.
Luckily the old system, along with the vendor, was terminated soon after I started. Why it took so many years was anyone’s guess. The amount of money wasted on overtime alone was astronomical, I’m sure. The old computer system was based on manual entry using paper and pencil. The completed paperwork went to a keypunch department. In addition to the slow computer system, the keypunch department would take weeks or months to
complete the data input. After inputting, the tape went on the computer system, which would update the patient accounts. The whole process was a slow-moving disaster that played out month after month. The local media even covered some of the drama at the time. To make the situation worse, the keypunch department was a private enterprise.
That meant they worked under contract with Milwaukee County and were pretty much immune to any pressure to work faster.
The new computer system used direct input. That was a vast improvement over the previous system. One big problem that developed right away was that many, if not most of the staff, were computer illiterate. Of course, the employees knew what computers were; they just didn’t like them very much. There was no training offered, which meant everyone had to learn on their own. The computer system operated on the premise that the employees would know how to use it. As the transition from old to new progressed, the problems began to multiply.
The new computer system was a main-frame based system that contained over 100
programs running at the same time. The computer system offered a feature that many supervisors took advantage of, including Bill. They could order parts of the system shut down when they wanted to. It was more comfortable for the supervisors to shut down parts of the system rather than try to figure out how it worked. The problem with shutting down parts of the computer system was that it would corrupt other data. Anytime a program was turned off, it generated an error report. There were two cubicles in the office filled up with error reports. They were stacked up to six feet tall and took up the entire
cubicles. Eventually, Bill had the error reporting program turned off as well, so we no longer received error reports. That meant we had no way to monitor errors. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
The computer system itself was quite ingenious. I was able to get a copy of the entire program on paper at one point. I was genuinely amazed at what the system could do. It was an all-inclusive program that potentially could have eliminated virtually every job in the fiscal department. The system could have taken over inpatient registration, perform billing, and cash application. After all the information was inputted and processed, it would have generated hundreds of reports. All of that automation would have eliminated the need for most of the employees in the building.
The reality was far different, however. The computer system allowed a person to work on one account or thousands of accounts at a time. When a patient came into the hospital, each service provided was classified as a separate account. In theory, at least this was a good approach that allowed for account specialization as needed. However, as I noted earlier, the computer system was implemented on the premise that people would know how to use it. One thing that went wrong regularly was that when Medicare and Medicaid paid patient bills, the patients would get billed for the write off amount. The write off amounts might run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The write off amount was the amount the hospital was supposed to write off and not bill the patient.
Sometimes it was done right and other times not so much.
Another fun fact was that some of the patients had two or three separate health insurance policies for whatever reason. The primary insurance would get billed, but the second or third policy might not get charged until months or more went by if ever. By then, the grace period for submitting claims would pass, and the insurance companies would reject the claim, and then the patient would get billed. After enough time had passed, the hospital would turn over the unpaid claims to outside collection agencies who would harass patients for money they didn’t owe. For no particular reason, the Medical Complex had contracted with five separate collection agencies to collect money, which made it all the more entertaining.
On the reverse side of not billing and getting paid properly, there was the problem of the
“credit account” that was our department’s responsibility. It contained payments dating back up to 20 years or more that sat on the account and unused. No one could figure out where the money came from or where it was supposed to go. Supposedly it was money sent by insurance companies and patients for bills owed. But for some reason, no one in the department knew where the money was supposed to go. A complicating issue was that the medical complex had existed at the county grounds for close to 100 years. That meant we had to wade through almost 100 years’ worth of records to get information.
That “credit account” with its hundreds of thousands of dollars finally disappeared at some point. Who knows where it went, no one knew what to do with it anyways. Vera would appreciate that.
At least those problems were in-house, and we had some input. Unfortunately, there were other problems we dealt with that we had no control over. For some reason, the computer system we used was maintained by a private vendor who worked out of the Medical College basement. One thing that the vendor’s computer operators were known for was re-running computer tapes. The tapes contained patient billing information.
Payment information from Medicare would come in on computer tape, which the operator was supposed to run on the computer system. That would have the effect of mass posting of data. I don’t know why this was allowed remotely, but it was.
The computer operators would get their instructions crossed and run the same payment tapes over and over, resulting in patient accounts receiving payment credit over and over.
The patients would receive a bill with a credit balance. The more work you do, the more work you get was an unofficial motto throughout Milwaukee County. Once I settled into my job, I didn’t have too much difficulty doing my work. However, when things would go wrong, George would inevitably ask me to take a look and see if I could do anything to help. George had an unlimited supply of temporary workers from employment agencies at his disposal. He would assign them to me as needed and let me know he could always get more. I didn’t mind too much since George had hired me. I was an account clerk II now, which meant it was a promotional job, and I was making like 20
cents an hour more!
I did enjoy the challenge, and it was an exciting experience at times to coordinate the activities of so many people. The computer errors that would come through the department were colossal, and it would take up to a dozen of us to fix things. Going through thousands and tens of thousands of accounts to make corrections took an enormous amount of overtime, but there was no choice. No matter how many problems we fixed, there was always another one on the way.
We didn’t cause most of the problems, but we had to correct them none the less. At least I got to interact with more people this way. We had so much work to do that people from other departments even helped us out. They wanted the overtime, and we had the work, but unfortunately, the people that showed up to work with us weren’t always the brightest. They just wanted the overtime money mostly, I think. There was so much work piled up that George and Bill were willing to take any warm body just to move the paper around. At least it kept people busy, and it looked good. Kind of like the Mental Health Complex at times, I’m afraid.
There was a woman named Dorothy that worked with us quite a bit. She started at 5:00
am and worked to 7:00 pm Monday thru Friday. Fourteen hours a day, five days a week, although she didn’t do 14 hours of work every day. I don’t think she did even 8 hours of work every day. Most of the time, she sat at her desk with a blank look on her face and stared into space. Other times she would disappear for hours on end. Dorothy always had
a stack of paper on her desk and a pen in her hand. But the paperwork never seemed to move. I made sure to dumb down the work as much as possible that I gave people to do.
That helped to keep errors to a minimum. That way, if Dorothy fell asleep while working, it wouldn’t cause too much trouble.
The temporary workers that George hired from temp agencies were a mixed breed. One, in particular, was Debra. She hated living in Milwaukee. She would refer to it as Milwaukee, Mississippi. She was forever making some crass remarks about why she hated white people. She seemed to enjoy directing her comments at me for some reason.
She claimed to have lived all over the country but stayed in Milwaukee for some reason.
Judy, not the same Judy from the courthouse, was a regular employee who just didn’t like men for some reason. I know this because she told me that often. Her favorite remark was, “it’s nothing personal, but I hate men, and you’re here.” There were only a handful of people like Judy, who had worked in cash application for any length of time. I guess time took its toll. Delores, the accounting clerk in charge, had job skills that would have fit in perfectly anywhere in the 1950s. She was able to complete one transaction at a time, never faster, never slower. She always seemed annoyed at any form of technology, and anyone like me that used it.
Eventually, George had to start hiring regular employees. That’s how Allen got hired.
Allen was a rather mean, miserable, flatulent little man. He was kind of like a male version of Vera or Linda but much more bitter. Alan desperately craved the recognition his delusion of grandeur demanded, but sadly for him would never receive it. He had previously worked at the courthouse for five years. Before that, Allen worked at Allis Chalmers but got laid off after many years of service. Poor Allen, he was an angry white man nearly 50 years old and just couldn’t get the “big” promotion even though he had a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Marquette.
Marquette grads are easy to spot in the county system because they tend to tell everyone where they went to school, and Allen was no exception. I guess he hoped it would pave the way for something better. Marquette grads did seem to do well in the county. In Allen’s case, however, nothing he did seemed to work, so he complained.
He started complaining almost as soon as he started working with us. Allen refused to attempt any task unless he was “trained.” Allen seemed slightly annoyed at the prospect of having to do any work at all. He was on the short side, so maybe he had something of a Napoleon complex. Allen was very aggressive physically and would often try to stare people down. That didn’t work out so well since Allen was so short all he could do was stare at people's chins.
One day the computer system went down unexpectedly, and Bill came through the office.
He wanted everyone to stay busy. Allen had a pile of paper reports on the floor next to his desk. Bill told Allen to put them in a box. Allen looked Bill in the chin said he wasn’t able to do that because no one had trained him! Bill was visibly startled and repeated the instruction, at which point Allen realized how stupid it looked and proceeded to find a box. When he wasn’t complaining, Allen was bothering just about everyone in the building. Allen was like a fidgety grade school kid who just couldn’t sit still. He was like the kid that the teacher would have to watch, except, of course, we had no one to watch Allen. Allen went from one department to another, bothering people. Allen got inside just about every cubicle and office in the building. He would always ask vague yet loosely work-related questions. He would wander into someone’s cubicle or office and ask how long they worked there, for instance. Allen had a whole range of problems with which to bother people. Who’s your supervisor, do you like that person? What work do you do, and how do you like it? These were some of Allen’s questions. Eventually, people complained a lot. Supervisors around the building began ordering Allen out of their departments one by one. Why Bill and George didn’t get involved was a mystery.
One day I was near the accounts payable department. That department was right next to ours. I just happened to see Allen as he walked in there. He walked up to the supervisor’s desk and tried to engage him in conversation. I couldn’t hear what Allen was saying exactly, but I did hear the supervisor. He told Allen he had to leave. Allen just stood there
and kept talking to the supervisor. The supervisor threatened to call the sheriff security to have him removed. Allen just stood there and kept talking. The supervisor picked up the phone and began dialing the sheriff's security. At that point, Allen finally got the hint and left, rather briskly. It was probably the fastest Allen had ever walked while working at the Medical Complex. Now there was nowhere left for Allen to go, so he had to stay in cash applications every day.
By the time Allen’s rear end hit the chair each morning, his mouth was open. Allen would then proceed to tell anyone who would listen or even if no one was listening, what had happened to him between the time he left the day before and the time he arrived that morning plus everything he thought about during that time. Allen would talk about the traffic, his wife, kids, in-laws, plans for the future or past experiences he had, or about when he was born or what was happening in the world when he born. It was near endless. However, when Allen did run out of things to talk about, he would then go from desk to desk asking dumb questions just to elicit a response. Anything to avoid working, I suppose.
Eventually, I guess Allen started running out of material because he began to woo the ladies with stories about his exploits on the front lines in Vietnam. Allen dazzled us with stories of heroics and life and death drama in the combat zone. After some probing questions from people in the office, however, Allen finally admitted that he was a payroll
clerk on a supply base in Vietnam far removed from the front lines. All the stories he had told were told to him by others, and Allen was simply repeating them except in the first person. The only action that Allen got was dodging paper clips and exploding pens. I didn’t care to ask, but it sounded like Allen never got promoted while in service. After his discharge, he went to work for Allis Chalmers for about 20 years. The skills he developed while in Vietnam processing payroll under fire weren’t enough to get promoted there either before getting laid off. Eventually, he began working at the courthouse for a supervisor who made him buy her coffee and donuts every day. I could never figure out why George hired Allen. George didn’t seem to know why, either.
One day Sandy started in the department. She just showed up and started mumbling “all’s fair in love and work.” I didn’t know what she meant by that, but her desk was directly across from Allen. That gave Allen someone to bother, which was a great relief to the rest of us. Sandy didn’t engage Allen in conversation. She mostly just nodded her head unless I was around, then she would shake her head and mumble “all’s fair in love and work.”
Judy, the angry white woman, had also started saying, “what comes around goes around”
to me whenever I would pass her desk. That was in addition to the usual “it’s nothing personal, but I hate men, and you’re here” routine. Even Debra, the creepy temp, was giving me the evil eye. I knew something was going on, but I just wasn’t sure what.
One day Elaine showed up. I had never seen her before. Elaine knew everything there was to know in everything related to hospital operations. At least that’s what ‘they’ said. You know ‘they’ are always right, aren’t ‘they’? She previously had worked at the eye clinic and was put on loan to us. Elaine only liked to converse with the women in cash application, including Delores. Delores, by this time, had taken to staring at me like I just ran over her dog. I knew something big was going on, but no one would say what.
Another day Roger showed up. It was a different Roger than in chapter 1. The new Roger had worked at the hospital for quite a while. Roger just showed up one day and plopped down at an empty desk. He was just there, and no one knew why. Still, no one would say what was going on until finally, one day, the ax fell.
Along the front wall of this enormous building we worked in were various analysts and supervisors. I didn’t pay much heed to them except to talk with Bill on occasion who had his office along this wall as well. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the people on the wall. The controller of the department had hired one of her girlfriends to work in the office. Big mistake! I don’t recall the controller's name, but the name of the girlfriend that she hired was Rachel. This event happened about a year after I started. I could never have imagined so many things going wrong so quickly. The coup was over before I even knew it started. Somehow Rachel had gotten her friend/boss fired and took her job and her office. The revolution was over, and the women were in charge.
The previous controller was content to let the supervisors (mostly old white guys) run their sections. However, things changed quickly. The re-education could now begin. Now I understood why Sandy kept saying “all’s fair in love and work.” The weirdness would now start in earnest. At least I was able to get some information. I never found out who hired who or decided what. No one wanted to put anything in writing for some reason.
Most of the information I got was second hand, but anyways, Roger was our new supervisor. The reason for his placement in our department was so that Elaine could watch him. The hospital administration wanted to fire Roger but needed a reason why.
Elaine’s job was to document Roger’s mistakes and ultimately help terminate Roger and then take his position as our supervisor. Supposedly Roger knew this, although I never asked him about it directly. I couldn’t talk to Roger about much of anything as he didn’t know anything. He was a manager at large in the hospital complex, but he had no expertise in anything that I could tell.
Elaine, on the other hand, was supposedly the expert on everything. She was supposed to study our department and make changes as necessary. One change she made right away was to assign “special” duties to Sandy. Sandy was suddenly Elaine’s go-to girl.
Ultimately Sandy was supposed to assume the role of supervisor. Elaine could then go back and do whatever it was she did where ever she did it before. Unfortunately, Sandy didn’t know how to do much of anything, but no one cared. As part of her enhanced job duties, Sandy came up with a new idea for our file rack. The cash application section
had a wall filled up with paper files that contained financial information on patients.
We would access these files as needed to do our work. Each patient had a medical record number, but these files were in name order from A to Z. This filing system was probably in place for decades, at least. Like most of the department, it was a little creaky, but it worked.
Well, Sandy didn’t like it. Sandy decided that instead of alphabetical order, we should keep the files in the medical record number order. The girls in the office were delighted. Sandy had an idea, and they were going to roll with it. Rachel and Elaine were so pleased with Sandy’s design that they created a “special” project with overtime. The files were rearranged on a Saturday when most of the other staff was gone. The following Monday, when I came back, the project was complete. All of the files were now in medical record number supposedly. All of the women in the office congratulated Sandy on a job well done. Sandy was on her way; it seemed.
Eventually, the other staff and I had to retrieve files from Sandy’s new file system. A little problem developed because the records were not in order. I and others couldn’t find any records suddenly. The files weren’t in alphabetical or numerical order. The records weren’t in any discernable order at all. With the previous alpha based system, it was usually easy to spot files that were out of place. With Sandy’s new numeric system, the records just seemed to disappear. Of course, they were there somewhere, but we couldn’t
find them. When confronted with this problem she had created, Sandy replied that it was
“just an idea.” Since we couldn’t find the files anymore, we had to guess a lot. Years later, Sandy worked as a supervisor at the courthouse downtown after the hospital closed.
Really. No, really. NO, REALLY! She retired with an ending salary of $50,000.00 and she got a $200,000.00 pension bonus plus a $2000.00 monthly pension.
Bill and George were now just office clerks. Their job duties were suddenly scaled back and passed on to anyone wearing makeup. They were stuck, they couldn’t go anywhere.
They couldn’t retire yet. They couldn’t transfer since they were both accountants, and there weren’t many openings for accountants. Our introduction to Rachel’s management style came quickly. I was at my desk working one day, and suddenly I heard a blood-curdling scream thunder across the office. I’m sure everyone else in the building heard it as well. I jumped up from my desk and looked towards Rachel’s office. I knew the scream came from Rachel, and it sounded like she was in distress. I was ready to rush over to her office. I had never heard anyone scream like that before. It was like a horror movie scream you might hear if someone was disemboweled or having their limbs chopped off one by one. Then silence.
I didn’t know what to make of it. When I first heard the scream, I expected to see Rachel running bloody across the office with someone chasing her with a butcher knife in hand.
It was that kind of a scream. I went back to work, not sure what to think. About a week or
so later, I was in the billing area on the opposite side of the building. This time I was only about 20 feet from Rachel’s office. Suddenly she started screaming. I was stunned. It was even worse than the first time since I was so close to her office this time. It was startling to hear someone scream like that. I slowly made my way to the front of the building. I half expected to see Rachel lying dead on the floor. It was that intense of a scream. As I gingerly made my way, I looked around at other people whose offices were close by, and the people looked shell shocked. You’d think a plane had crashed into the building or something equally terrifying. As I got closer to Rachel’s office, I noticed one of Rachel’s secretaries with tears in her eyes. I was utterly dumbfounded. I had no idea what to say or do except go back to my desk.
Sometime later, I discovered that Bill was the recipient of Rachel’s outburst. The reason for her tantrum was Bill had transposed a number on an excel spreadsheet. You know, like entering “6” instead of “9”, that kind of thing. Rachel had taken the spreadsheet to a meeting downtown at the courthouse. It was during this meeting that she discovered Bill’s error. Rachel came back to work and let him have it. That was it, one number transposed and she turned into a psycho. Bill disappeared after that scream. He went to counseling offered by Milwaukee County. I know he was sent because someone (Rachel?) had written that on a location board that everyone could see. It let the staff know where the managers were from day-to-day. So embarrassing, and so mean, times had changed quickly; Bill needed help adjusting to the ravings of a lunatic.
Bill came back after a week with his hair dyed darker and appeared very calm. I guess he had gotten fixed. That wasn’t the end of Rachel’s tirades, though. She was just getting started. As time went on, I noticed that whenever Rachel would scream at Bill or any of the other white guys, there were peals of laughter from women across the office. Rachel never so much as raised her voice to the women or minorities in the office. She only screamed at the white and (mostly old) guys. Rachel never yelled at anyone outside of her or their office. She usually stayed in her office, but when she did come out to converse with anyone, she stuck with a pattern. As she made her way, Rachel would talk to women in a whisper, and to any men she encountered, she would yell. Rachel wouldn’t scream at men out in the office, just roar. George and I noticed that trait right away. If Rachel walked up to Sandy, for instance, she would whisper so soft no one could hear. If Rachel then talked to me, she would yell. The yelling didn’t mean she was mad, that was just her regular conversation voice with men.
George and I picked up on a curious habit Rachel had. On occasion, she would wear a Yarmulke on her head. It was just barely noticeable, but whenever she wore it, she was civil. She wouldn’t even raise her voice and would even say “hello” to me. George and I would make it a point to see if Rachel was wearing the Yarmulke from day-to-day. If she was, we knew we were in the clear for that day at least. She would make up for the civility on other days, though.
One day Rachel was in the office of one of the analysts and called me in to ask me if I had a report. I told her no, there was no such report, and she blew up at me. Rachel started screaming at me as she did at Bill. Unfortunately for her, I wasn’t Bill, and I shouted back. I honestly didn’t know I had it in me. I don’t know where it came from, but I matched her decibel for decibel. I’m surprised the office ceiling didn’t cave in by the both of us screaming at each other. Rachel finally gave up, and as I turned to leave the analyst’s office, I realized that Rachel’s boss was standing right behind me. He had listened to the conversation yet made no effort to muzzle Rachel. He was an old white guy like Bill and George. Rachel’s boss was married to the analyst in whose office we argued. Rachel’s boss was, how the ladies might say, a well-trained man.
Nearly no one was safe from Rachel’s tantrums, it seemed. There was a white guy about Bill’s age, who was an accountant. He had suffered a stroke some years before and lost some use of his voice. As a result, he talked quite slowly. One day Rachel went into his office and proceeded to scream at him in her usual psycho rage. The guy just couldn’t talk back due to his disability. He couldn’t keep up with Rachel verbally, so he had to sit and take it. There was no code of decency immune from Rachel’s outburst, but even this was a new low.
The laughing continued, though, the louder the screams, the louder the laughter. I couldn’t figure out what was so amusing to the women in the office. This group of white, mostly
older women, would laugh after every one of Rachel’s tantrums. It was such a consistent theme. I would hear Rachel screaming in her office, and immediately, there were cackles of laughter across the room. It was like a blood lust, I guess. Rachel never screeched more than once a day, so when I heard it, I knew she had claimed her victim for the day. The laughter afterward really puzzled me, and I didn’t know who to ask about it.
One day when I was outside the building on a smoke break, I was called over by one of the women from the collection’s unit. I had just finished a cigarette and was on my way back into the building. She called me over to the picnic table where she was sitting, and she motioned for me to sit down and then told me a story. She wanted me to know that what was going on in the office was nothing personal against me. She said that when she and the other older women had started working at the Medical Complex back in the 1970s, things were different. This woman claimed that she and the other women were subject to constant crude remarks and harassment by the white males of the day years earlier. The way she and the other women looked at the current situation, Rachel’s outbursts were satisfying a need for revenge, and any white guys would do. Rachel was, in their eyes, their avenger hence the laughter. This conversation did take place.
As strange as the story sounded, at least I now had an explanation for the laughing.
Rachel had just started working there, but she was an accountant with credentials. She decided that she knew better than anyone else. Rachel decided that the structure of the
cash application department had to change. Up until then, there were account clerks like me who were assisted by clerk typists. Rachel didn’t like that for some reason. She decided that anyone off the street could do the work that the account clerks did. By this time, Allen and I were the only white guy account clerks left. Allen was by then; however, Elaine and Sandy’s office pet. I suspected that the new work rules coming from Rachel were directed at least partly at me. It would explain Judy’s outburst.
After Rachel took over, Judy did stop saying, “what comes around goes around,” but she did keep up with the “it’s nothing personal, but I hate men, and you’re here” routine.
Sandy never stopped saying, “all’s fair in love and work.” It was kind of like the little kid in the movie who kept saying redrum. Rachel proceeded to reclassify the clerk typists to account clerks. There was even one person recently hired as a clerk typist. By the time she started, the position had changed to account clerk II. That meant she had gotten an instant promotion without even trying. Rachel sidestepped the whole promotional and hiring process to prove her point that any moron could do the work that we the cash applications staff did.
Suddenly the office was filled up with account clerks, many of whom had no idea what to do. These were usually promotional jobs that people like me waited years to get, but Rachel thought she knew better. Rachel put Elaine in charge of this mess. Remember, Elaine was the expert, or so we were told. Elaine didn’t think much of our job skills,
except for Sandy’s. Elaine was a lot like Rachel, but older and creepier and her wardrobe accentuated her attitude. She would frequently wear a black nurse uniform to work. We were working in a hospital, of course, but Elaine was not a nurse. I don’t know where she got the outfits from or why she wore them, but she did.
Elaine’s view was similar to Rachel’s in that she figured that the women in the office could overcome any problem. I guess that all sounds noble, but the reality was that the department had a tremendous amount of paper. Disrupting the paper flow could lead to a disaster and guess what, it did. Elaine was quickly overwhelmed. She just didn’t know what to do. The more frustrated she got, the meaner she got. At one point, I heard Delores ask Elaine about her general attitude and demeanor. Elaine replied that she wasn’t concerned about the morality of her conduct. Elaine stated quite emphatically that she knew she was going to hell when she died, so nothing mattered. She seemed to want everyone to think she was tough. I heard her tell Allan that her father wanted a son, so he raised Elaine like a man. What that was supposed to mean, I have no idea.
Roger was still there, but he was mostly just taking up space. He was supposedly the supervisor, but in name only I discovered. Since Roger didn’t know how to do anything, everyone was waiting on Elaine to come up with some new tricks to make everything work. One big problem that Elaine faced was that she was a very naughty girl and needed lots of discipline. I know this because Elaine’s boyfriend would show up from
time to time at the end of the day. He would sit in Elaine’s cubicle with her and tell her what a naughty girl she was. Her boyfriend was a, wait for it, Milwaukee County sheriff deputy. Elaine’s boyfriend/master had a private “jail,” and he would take her there along with the other naughty girls. I even heard one of the other account clerks, Jeanette, go into Elaine’s cubicle from time to time for some chastisement. I don’t know where this naughty girl’s ‘jail’ was located, but the Medical Complex was a big place. By this time, I had cut back on overtime, so I was thankfully able to leave before the discipline sessions started.
You would think that the union would take notice of all the drama going on. Rachel had violated just about every labor union, civil service, and rule of decency there was, but nothing happened. A big problem with the union was that it was run mostly by women and minorities. I think the reason was that the women and minority employees were reaping the benefit of Rachel’s actions. Rachel was only going after the evil white men anyways, so nobody cared.
There was one union steward who tried to stand up to the new management. He was a former outdoor park laborer who had gotten laid off and ended up a file clerk in the fiscal department. He looked like a biker and had the attitude to match. That was probably a good thing considering the circumstances. He supplemented his income by volunteering for experiments at the Medical College—one in particular involved blood
pressure medication. After taking the drug, he was required to urinate into a plastic jug and then save the pitcher and turn it over to the medical college. He kept the pitcher at his desk and carried it in a paper bag back and forth to the bathroom. Everyone could hear him walking by even with the cubicle walls because of the whooshing sound the urine in the jug made. As comical as this was, he was the last great white hope. That didn’t last for long, though, as he “raised” his voice to a woman billing supervisor, and Rachel suspended him for three days. So much for that idea, well at least he tried, I guess. Several years later, he retired on disability. The story I heard was that one day he lay down on the floor of the file room and started yelling for help. The paramedics were called and took him away, and he never came back. Bad back supposedly.
Things got worse before they got even worse. Elaine just couldn’t come up with any ideas, unfortunately. Elaine had committed her soul to an eternity of damnation as she had told Delores, but all she could come up with was an excel pie chart. All the pie charts showed was how much work wasn’t getting done. As it turned out, she didn’t know a thing about the new computer system, nor did Allen the combat payroll clerk or Roger or Sandy or Rachel or anyone else. After hearing Rachel’s screaming a few times, I put in for a transfer. I hadn’t planned on leaving, but things were just getting too weird for me.
A hiring freeze across the county was announced right about the time I put in for a transfer. That meant I was stuck, and all I could do was tough it out.
Amidst all of this turmoil, there was a character named Luis, who was the hospital security director. He made it his mission to stop everyone from smoking or at least try.
Funny how the whole department was disintegrating, and all this guy could think about was smoking. He even tried to ban smoking in the morgue. Luis told the doctor in charge of the morgue he had to stop smoking because it would bother non-smokers. The morgue doctor pointed out that all the nonsmokers in the morgue were dead anyways. Luis told him he would still have to create a nonsmoking section. The doctor made a sign to designate a no-smoking area. He attached it to a pillar and drew an arrow pointing down and wrote Luis’s name under the pointer. This way, the spot was then reserved for Luis whenever he came in. The sign was visible from the hallway too.
As Rachel’s work rule changes became active, the flow of paperwork slowly ground to a near halt. The cash application department filled up with people like Elaine, who had no idea what to do. The whole fiscal department across the entire building was descending into a maze of strangeness. One of the supervisors of the billing department came up with a wardrobe policy. It was the same one that the union steward “raised his voice” too. She and the other supervisors came up with a list of items that employees could wear or not.
One thing she insisted on was that all clothing had to contain at least 50% cotton. She would even walk into her worker’s cubicles and feel their clothing to make sure it complied. Another rule was that employees could not wear blue jeans at work. Women were allowed to wear blue jean skirts though, which was a point of contention for one of
the male employees. As a sign of protest, he shaved his legs and wore a blue jean skirt to work. He got a warning from his boss not to do that again, but the wardrobe policy never changed. That episode was covered by the local media as well.
I applied for a promotional job about this time. The application was 12 pages long. I went to the Human Resources department at the courthouse for an interview with a panel of three people. Afterward, they sent me a letter to inform me that I ranked number one on the eligibility list. The pay range was only one step higher, but I didn’t care. I received another letter from the department. I was so excited to interview. Two people greeted me, the supervisor of the position, and his assistant. The supervisor was a black man, and his assistant was a white woman. At the time, I was finishing up my third college degree.
When I informed my prospective supervisor of this and my other accomplishments, he turned about ten shades whiter. His white female assistant looked shell shocked, but she wouldn’t look at me directly. Since I was number one on the list, I should have gotten hired, but I didn’t.
After the interview, I received thanks but no thanks letter from the supervisor. Now, if a woman or minority would have ranked number one and got denied, you already know the answer, I’m sure. Years later, the white female assistant was in the news. She lived on the north side with her husband and stopped one night at a restaurant. She got robbed while in the parking lot. The robber made her get on her knees and then blew her head off with
a blast of his shotgun. He later told police he didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
She wouldn’t look at me at all but him she looked in the eye!
Thankfully I had also applied for a job as a caseworker. After testing and interviews, I ranked number three on the eligibility list. I heard from many sources that more than a thousand people had applied. Only 20 people made it to training. Luckily, I was one of the 20, so I was able to give notice to Roger the make-believe supervisor we had. I’m sure Roger was happy to see me go. I’m pretty sure he was trying to get me fired. Several times Roger called me into his office and asked me odd questions. I think he was trying to get me to say something incriminating. I say that because each time I saw him fumble with a tape recorder under his desk. He kept trying to hide it and push buttons and record at the same time. Tape recorders back then were larger and harder to hide, and Roger was just too dumb.
My departure meant that Allen was the lone white guy account clerk left in cash applications. My replacement was also a white guy, but he had a sex change not long after he started, so I suppose “he” really didn’t count. I guess Rachel and the girls must have got to him. Allen was just too dense to cause any problem, so Elaine and Rachel had their little work utopia. I overheard Elaine in her cubicle say that she had attended meetings of the top hospital management, which was run by a woman at the time. Elaine kept bragging that the senior hospital management wanted to “weed out the Neanderthals” from the
hospital staff. I guess she and Rachel were getting their way little by little. I don’t mean to imply that Rachel and Elaine and Sandy and the other women hated men by any means, except for Judy anyways. I’m sure that anyone of them could have sucked the chrome off a tailpipe. But as Sandy liked to say, ‘all’s fair in love and work”.
Things should have worked for them after I left or so they must have hoped. But, GASP, the hospital closed. The job of the department was to bring in money to the hospital. Under Rachel’s guidance, the revenue all but dried up. It lost so much money that the county board closed it down only about two years after I transferred. Rachel and her underlings had accomplished a task that no man could in the previous hundred years.
They ran the hospital out of business, right into the ground. It was a haven for people who had no insurance and needed medical care and or medication. The hospital had survived through wars and depressions and recessions, but it was no match for Rachel.
In retrospect, the level of incompetence I encountered there was so staggering that I wondered at times if it was intentional. In the years since I have pondered from time to time if people like Rachel and Sandy and Roger and Elaine were there to hasten the hospital's closure. Maybe someone higher up had assigned them there on purpose to take advantage of their job skills or lack of anyway. After I left, I complained to the EEOC
about what went on at the Medical Complex. An investigator from EEOC phoned me at home one day and laughed when I told her of the goings-on there. After she stopped
laughing, she said yes, I had a valid complaint but I had waited too long to file, I bet. At any rate, the girl’s night out was over. At least the employees were dressed well when they got laid off.
Many of the hospital staff relocated throughout the county system. People like Elaine and Sandy and Allen were now able to take their expertise to other county departments.
Delores and George retired on their hefty county pensions. I don’t know what happened to Rachel and Bill. The building/former laundry is gone now, and the space it occupied is part of the Medical College. I was sure glad to get out of there when I did. Honestly, I would have taken a job sweeping cages at the zoo just to get out of that nuthouse. I had no idea what to expect in my new job. I had to attend job training for about six weeks on 12th and Vliet. So now, I would try again to find a somewhat normal place to spend my career. I always tried to stay optimistic.
Seven years into my time with Milwaukee County and I was right back on 12th and Vliet where I started. Vera would think that was funny. She had retired a few years earlier, and much to her disappointment, I’m sure; the building didn’t fall down when she left. I don’t know what happened to Vera’s workload or if anyone replaced her since no one knew what she was doing there. Carol had taken a regular retirement, and Regina had retired on disability and then passed away, sad.
The remodeling that was going on when I left years earlier was now complete. The training room was on the third floor and could accommodate about 15 people comfortably. Of course, the training staff had crammed all 20 of us in there. I was now a caseworker. I was back in the same building that I started in, but the name of the department was always changing. Human Services or Social Services or welfare central or some other name, but it was all the same. The position of caseworker had many names over the years; some not fit to print. It was now known as an economic support specialist or usually just ‘worker.’
Along with the new position name came a pay reclassification eventually. That was much appreciated and, of course, better than nothing. Out of the 20 people to start, there was only one other white guy in the room. He decided to go back to his old job though
soon after the training began. He said it was just too complicated for him or something like that.
Then it was just me, 17 women and a Puerto Rican guy that had worked as a janitor at the courthouse. Somehow, he had passed the test and interviews, how I have no idea. His hair is worth mentioning, though. His girlfriend had shaved a circle into the top of his head and then made him grow his hair long down his back. He was always coming in late, so everyone in the room could see the hair and shaved bald spot when he came and went. His girlfriend must have had some specialized skill to get him to wear his hair that way. I don’t know how he even managed to keep his first job at the courthouse. He got fired, though. Mary, the manager of the training supervisors, fired him on the second last day of training. All that time and effort for nothing, plus he couldn’t go back to his old job at the courthouse because too much time had passed.
The training went eight hours a day, five days a week for about six weeks. We were supposed to have more training and some practice, but they needed the caseworkers right away. We each received training manuals that totaled some 2000 pages in length. The training manuals were the basis for the job that we had. The training manuals relied on something called pseudocode. Pseudocode was a throwback to a programming language used long ago. There was a certain skill level required to decipher the pseudo-code. As I soon discovered, most people didn’t have it.
As with the hospital, the Human Services department, where I now worked, was converting to a new computer system. That in itself didn’t matter since most of the employees didn’t know how to use the old computer system anyways. The department had caseworkers and supervisors and section supervisors and assistant directors and a director. There were also the clerical support workers who were supposed to help make the department work. The new computer system was supposed to help streamline the whole department. The state Human Services department in Madison wanted all of the counties in Wisconsin to have all of the welfare cases uploaded as soon as possible.
This new computer system was also in use in several other states, including Florida.
Something went wrong in Florida, which caused the whole system to freeze up. There were lines of people blocks long at various agencies in Florida trying to get food stamps and such. That was in the news at the time. According to our training supervisors, Florida welfare administrators were indicted and sent to prison because of the computer problems. That scared the administrators in Madison, so they authorized much overtime in the hope that we would get all the work done and hopefully keep them out of jail.
I was surprised at how much work the caseworkers were expected to do. Of course, most of the caseworkers didn’t do that much. For myself, I had to learn how to use the old computer system which was getting phased out anyways then expected to learn an entirely new computer system once on the job. Most of the training was uneventful. I was
surprised by the background of some of my coworkers. The Puerto Rican guy was one.
His hiring didn’t make any sense, although his firing seemed quite logical.
There was a black woman who I swear just didn’t like white people, especially white women who tried to tell her what to do like Mary. Mary, the parade lady, they called her because she stood at a distance, and waved at everyone, told us to come to training on time. The black trainee seemed more than a little bit insulted. Whatever time we were due back, she would come in last. If we started at 2:15 pm, for instance, she would come in at 2:15 and 55 seconds just to annoy Mary. Mary never hesitated to get in her face, though, to express her displeasure. Mary was petite while the trainee was tall and fat, so it was quite entertaining to watch. There were other black women in the training room, but this one just seemed to have a chip on her shoulder.