The summer I decided to remain in Moorhead and not go home from college, picking up a few summer school classes and finding work, turned out to be a humbling one. I applied for nearly ten jobs before I finally found one working at an insurance company.
I found myself taking a math aptitude test prior to being hired, and then learning about the exciting world of multi-peril crop insurance.
I also learned, for the first time, what it was like to work in an office full of women.
This cartoon illustrates the second (and last) summer that I worked there. I arrived to work one day, prepared to begin going through the huge stack of crop insurance forms and cross-referencing the acreage when my boss called me into the file room.
“This is where we keep all of our policy holder’s files,” she said. “This includes not just crop insurance, but auto and so forth.”
The room was wall-to-wall filing cabinets. There were thousands and thousands of files.
“OK,” I said, an uneasy feeling growing in my stomach.
“We have them alphabetized, but we are now going to start filing by policy number. Please reorganize these files accordingly.”
I was in there for weeks.
On the plus side, I got out of the office full of women and their claws.
[...] coffee, etc.). The last office job I had, in fact, was back in college. I worked two summers in a crop insurance department which required me to take a timed math test in order to get the job initially. I’d done the [...]