I'm retired now, but when I was working, I never doubted my career choice. I'm a problem solver, so the field of administration was perfect for me. I excelled in office administration in high school and my first job was as secretary to Chairman of the Board of a large Washington, DC
travel agency. Most of my friends who didn't go to college went to work for the government at $3200 a year without shorthand ad $3600 a year with shorthand (no, those figures aren't typos! This was in 1965 - I'm old!). My first job paid $4912 per year, with free travel benefits.
I left the travel agency when I married and after DD#1 was born 18 months later, DH's Army assignment sent us to Panama. With no car and a new baby, I was a SAHM. I didn't like it very much, so when we returned to the States, I got a job in the Admissions Office of the local community college. My secretarial and administrative skills helped me get promoted to Secretary to the Director of Admissions and Records, and then to Secretary to the Dean of the English Department.
Four years and one baby later, I found myself in Florida with two little girls while DH completed an assignment in Can Tho, Viet Nam. Again, I was unhappy as a SAHM, so my mother, who lived close by, took care of the girls while I worked in the English Department at the University of Central Florida. When DH came home, we went back to Maryland and I went back to PGCC. A little over two years later, DH got an assignment to Madrid, Spain, and I went to work at the Embassy. After that, I was hooked!
We spent the better part of the next 24 years serving at Embassies and Consulates all over the world (after Spain, we served in Peru, Turkey, England, Indonesia, Cote d'Ivoire. the Philippines, and Germany. The skills and training I had enabled me to build on what I learned in school and served me well as I established a highly respected career as an Executive Assistant in the Foreign Service, Department of State. I worked for some pretty high level State Department officers and some of my work ended up on the desk of the Secretary of State.
Most of my managers recognized my excellent training and gave me assignments with more and more responsibility. I did a lot of original writing, ranging from defending requests for housing variance waivers to the memo of which I'm most proud. When the U.S. re-established relations with Cambodia, I worked in the East Asia office. The managers had selected the officers to staff the Embassy, had found and renovated a building to be the new Embassy, and had shipped all the office furniture and communications and security equipment to the new Embassy. What they hadn't done was send a memo to the SecState asking permission to officially open relations with Cambodia! My manager, the Administrative Officer, was given that assignment, which he promptly turned over to me. He have me the points that needed to be addressed and the routing list of the State Dept. officers who had to sign off on this memo. I worked on it for two days and turned it over to him with the disclaimer that I had never done a memo of this magnitude, that it was well above my pay grade, that I had no false pride of authorship, and that my feelings wouldn't be hurt by any changes. To my utter astonishment, my original memo went through 17 coordinators with only two minor changes: someone changed "an" to "the" and I mentioned "the destruction of the Soviet Union" and someone changed "destruction" to "disestablishment." SecState signed off, we were officially in Cambodia!
My experience in writing and editing all kinds of documents, reports, briefings, and white papers led to my second career as a book and short story editor. I don't have enough work to support myself, but I don't need to support myself. DH and I both have government annuities and Social Security, so I edit because I enjoy the work, I'm good at it, and it keeps me off the streets, stealing hubcaps. I've edited six short stories and a mystery novel, which has been published, so my name is in the Library of Congress!
Queen Collee
But since I do, the thing I find most satisfying is doing a job that maximizes my income.
