Night Rain: On Bad Jobs and Bad Bosses by Goodwin Jerry

Author:Goodwin, Jerry [Goodwin, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

FINANCIAL SAVINGS AND LOAN

I accepted a job as a funding clerk at Financial Savings. Their office was just down the street on Shaw Avenue. The office was new when I first went there. There weren’t even cubicles and you could still smell the new carpet glue.

There wasn’t much business in the first few weeks. I was trying to learn quadratic equations from an algebra class I was taking at Fresno City College and I occupied myself with those to keep busy.

The funding procedure was different from what I had experienced at Guarantee Savings. Financial Savings worked a lot with brokers, for instance. Brokers, instead of loan officers, did much of the preliminary work to qualify buyers for loans. Then loan officers at Financial Savings would complete the process.

I had to type checks instead of preparing the checks on a computer and the part of the job that created the most problems for me was making a “copy file.” A copy file was photocopies we kept of the file. We sent the original file to the main office in San Diego, California.

Having to make copy files always kept me behind. One day when making copy files it occurred to me I might have enough savings to survive a few months if I quit. So I gambled and quit Financial Savings in May, 1987.

Then I had my first exposure to temporary agencies and temporary jobs. The first temp job I got was at Fireman’s Fund Insurance on Shaw Avenue. I typed pages for insurance policies. This was typing on an old-fashioned typewriter, not a word processor. The job was supposed to last for six months, but lasted around six weeks.

I had a data entry job in downtown Fresno and one afternoon I was headed home. I was stopped at a red light in front of the new jail that was being constructed. When the light changed I felt a bump. I pulled into a parking place just up the street.

A Fresno city bus was at the intersection. My car had apparently had some contact with the bus.

When the bus pulled up they said I had bumped into the bus. I am still skeptical that was true, but I couldn’t disprove what they said. A passenger on the bus claimed that he had suffered a whiplash injury.

I’m not a physicist, but I doubt he was injured. The contact was so minimal and my car was so much smaller than the bus I doubt there was enough force to cause any injures. The damage to my car was so minimal that I had a hard time seeing it. But the guy was put into a neck brace and transported to the hospital. My insurance company paid him $1,300.

About a year later a process server showed up at my door. The guy was suing me and the City of Fresno. I was extremely angry because I thought the initial claim was a sham and now he was trying to extract more money. I wrote to a columnist for the Fresno Bee named Jim Wasserman about the case.

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