We were young marrieds. I was still in school at UCR. We’d used up my little scholarship, and I got a student loan. It wasn’t quite enough.

Shirley had started college with me, but we knew one of us would have to drop out for awhile and get a job. We agreed she would be the one, and would catch up later after I graduated and got a job that paid enough. I wasn’t ruining her life, just postponing it.

She worked for the Phone Company. Office work. Filing. She would take the records of calls and contracts and installations, and file them in the long drawers in the big metal filing cabinets.

It was a nothing much job, she was over-qualified, and was good at it. She was patient and cheerful and came home at each day’s end to our life together.

She ate lunch with her co-workers and made friends. She was the youngest one there, and some of the women, they were mostly all women in the office who did the work, were older and felt motherly toward her, lovingly, protectively.

When she got pregnant, she started wearing pregnant clothes. Those are the clothes that hang down in front to preserve modesty and minimize the show.

As she got bigger, it got harder and harder to reach the back of the file drawers. She’d pull the drawer out and lean over and reach out her arms, finger the file open and put the report in.

She got called into the office. The Manager sat her down and gave her the talk. He wasn’t nice.

“You’re pregnant! We don’t hire pregnant women! They’re not good for business and don’t last long. And you wear those funny clothes. At first I thought you were just getting fat. Something’s gotta change.”

Shirley came out of the office in tears. Her co-workers gathered around her in support. An older woman with seniority, the leader of the group, said, “Go lie down in the back for fifteen minutes. We’ll cover for you. Don’t worry about the boss. We’ll take care of that.”

They did, and the boss was removed and replaced. Don’t mess with women when they get angry and protective of each other.

The protective woman said to Shirley, “How long have you been working here?”

“Nine months.”

They both laughed together.

While Shirley was still working, during college break I got a job also with the Phone Company. I was a frameman.

Those were the days when the wires and phone lines were in a big room in the back. The office was separate in the front, so Shirley and I never saw each other at work, but we went home together every night.

My job was to connect wires on the main frame. I had learned how to solder from Shirley’s father who owned a TV store, AltaPas TV, Sales and Service, and soldered all the time.

When I got to work at the Phone Company, they pointed proudly to a calendar prominently displayed. It said 373. Each day you could flip the numbers over to the next one. It was their safety record. 373 days without an accident. More than a year. They were working on a new record.

They showed me my job. I was to take the paper with numbers showing which wires to connect for new customers, which ones to disconnect when they quit their subscription, often because they died.

I would find the wires, strip the ends, twist together, bring the hot electric soldering iron up close in my right hand, hold the coil of solder in my left, touch the end of the coil to the flat nose of the iron, the solder would melt and drop on to the connection, sealing it and keeping it secure. The aim was to get a good round drop of solder on the connection where it would cool and harden and not spread out to leave a mess which could interfere with the electric flow. I got pretty good at making shiny round drops. [Side note: My daughter, on reading this, is horrified at my description of soldering, and explained to me how I did it completely wrong. She actually was trained on how to solder, and what I was doing was just making a mess that didn’t actually bond the wires together. But that’s another story.]

I could count the number of days I worked there by the numbers on the safety calendar, the numbers getting higher to the cheers of the employees and the bosses.

The main frame was very tall, and we had to use ladders to get to the top. For the connections at the very top, you had to stand on the ladder, keep your balance, crouch under the roof and reach back in to get to the wires.

It was like Shirley reaching back into the filing cabinet.

I was trying to juggle the roll of solder in my left hand, the paper that gave the numbers to be connected, and the hot soldering iron in my right hand. I stuck my nose in to see at the back, and it just brushed against the soldering iron.

There was a red burn spot on my nose but I brushed it off as nothing.

When I climbed down the ladder, the supervisor saw the red spot.

“You burned your nose.”

“It’s nothing.”

“No. It’s an accident. We have to report it. You need to go to the nurse and sign the papers.”

He wasn’t happy about it, and turned the pages of the accident calendar back to zero.

“It’s been zero days since the last accident.”

When I left to go back to school, they weren’t sorry to see me go.