by Barbara Wilson

Created on: August 11, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I am an experienced word processor. My last 20 years of employment were spent in this occupation, which I truly loved and for which I seemed to have a natural talent. I have always valued my time spent at the keyboard. There seemed to be a connection from the first day I sat in front of an old Royal manual typewriter in high school typing class, way back when an electric typewriter was advanced technology.

After I had been in the workforce for about 10 years, as a typist and secretary, I decided that I wanted to try something a little different. I looked over the help-wanted ads, and an ad caught my eye. The requirement was for a fast, accurate keyboardist who was interested in making very good money doing data entry. Well, that sounded right up my alley.

I went for a job interview, took a test, and was hired. It was going to be quite different from what I was accustomed to doing. This job entailed entering numbers into a database, numbers only. The hours were 11:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m., which would take some adjusting to, but I figured that I could get used to it. It would be rather nice to be free during the day to do some things that I could not do after "regular" working hours.

The first night that I reported for work, I was very excited about embarking on a new adventure in the work world. I was certainly in for a big surprise! I arrived at work, was greeted by a supervisor, and shown to my workstation. I was handed a stack of papers, nothing but line after line of numbers, and instructed to start entering these lines of numbers into the system. I was informed that we would take a 30-minute break for dinner at 2:00 a.m. Until that time, I was instructed to remain at my workstation. Hmmm, was my wonderful new adventure about to disappear before my very eyes?

For the next two and a half hours, I sat there keying in number after number after number. By the time the dinner break was announced, my eyes were crossing and my head was swimming! At exactly 2:00, we all proceeded to a break room, where everybody sat down to eat. Some of the other workers explained to me how things were done in this job. You had to be sitting in your chair at your workstation, ready to begin work, at exactly 11:00 p.m. You were not supposed to get up for any reason before the 2:00 dinner break. Huh? What if I had to go to the bathroom? You were supposed to wait until break time. Okaaay.

At exactly 2:29, the supervisor announced that it was time to go back to work. You should be sitting

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