Elevator Encounter

A chance conversation gets me thinking

On my way to the post office the other morning, I met a delivery man in the elevator of the building where I live. He was a gray-haired black man who looked to be well past retirement age. But clearly he was not retired. He was bringing three neatly-pressed suits to the lawyer who lives on the third floor. Somehow, he'd overshot his stop and was now headed back down.

"Good morning," the delivery man said to me. "I can tell by that beautiful smile that you're not on your way to work this morning." 

"You're absolutely right," I agreed. "I'm going to the post office. If I were on my way to work, I probably wouldn't be smiling."

"I know all about it," he told me. "There's the people who smile in the morning and then there's the people who don't smile in the morning. And they have their reasons."

"True," I agreed. "The people on the subway are usually frowning, for instance. And when I worked in midtown, I used to frown on the subway in the mornings too."

"All those sorrowful faces," he said.

"Most people seem to scowl when they're going to work," I said. Then, thinking of an exception, I added, "Not everyone, of course. My father used to sing on his way to work. He sang Italian arias at the top of his lungs--and my father hated his job."

"I sing on the way to work, and I don't like my job," the delivery man said.

"You and my father," I said. I pictured the two of them together--two old, gray-haired men singing as they walked down the street.

My father never retired either. Never could afford to. He didn't have a pension plan, he'd changed jobs so many times.

"Never go into advertising," he used to tell me. "It's a cut-throat business."

The day he died, five days short of his seventieth birthday, he missed an important meeting about industrial ball bearings. When he didn't show up, the marketing manager waited. But he couldn't wait all day. And there were plenty of other copywriters eager for the job. My father's heart stopped beating. But the industrial ball bearings rolled on. 

The neighbors, however, noticed his absence. Because nobody walked out the door singing Di Provenza il mar at eight-thirty-five.

"Never go into advertising," my father told me. But when I was twenty-two years old and desperately looking for a job--where did I end up? In advertising.

My first week on the job I was sent to employee orientation--me and twenty-five other new hires. We were all in our early twenties. They ushered us into a sleek little theater on the forty-first floor, where we watched back-to-back TV commercials for an hour.

There were upbeat ads for Seven-Up, misty Long Lines commercials that made you want to cry, and patriotic Join-the-Army commercials that made you want to kill. Then the president of agency stood up and told us that advertising was a wonderful business and we were very lucky to be there. If we didn't feel that way, we ought to leave right now, he said.

As for him, he loved his job. He was a very happy man, he told us, furrowing his brow and banging on the podium for emphasis. And every morning, while he was getting dressed, he said, he sang those wonderful tunes our agency created--tunes like Be All That You Can Be and America is Turning Seven-Up. And all the time that he was talking I stared at his face. I hadn't seen such a pinched face, I decided, since Richard Nixon gave his stepping down speech.

The women I worked with were old timers. They'd been with the agency 15, 20 and 25 years. After starting as secretaries, they'd been promoted to research early on, where they'd languished ever since. They wore dark wool skirts and pastel shirts with Peter Pan collars. They were underpaid and overworked and everyone knew it. But no one did anything about it because they were old timers and were considered expendable.

Besides, management knew they would never quit. One was supporting her mother. Another supported her disabled husband. Another was a single mother with a teenage son. They said to each other that they were too old to start job hunting now. Why would anyone want to hire one of them when they could get a young, hiply-dressed girl right out of college?

The old timers never sang on their way to work. That much was obvious. In fact no one in our department ever smiled in the morning until after she'd finished her third cup of coffee. Only the promise of vacation kept any of us going.

I saved up my money and went to England for ten days. The others usually went to Disney World or Epcot Center. Sometimes the single mom made sojourns to Atlantic City. The rest of the year the old timers worked late, got home at night exhausted, and unwound by watching TV.

Our lunch hour conversations were divided between the soaps and company gossip. They knew about middle-management embezzlements and high-level back-stabbings before anyone else did. Theirs was a byzantine world I was never quite at home in--never quite sure when they were referring to the board of directors and when to the cast of Dallas.

The old timers liked me, though, because I kept them laughing. Once in a while I took little moral stands which they found ridiculous but endearing. There was the time I refused to work on a new business pitch for our affiliate in Chile. "Because of Pinochet," I explained. And they kidded me for months afterward.

After two years, when I finally left advertising to return to school, I felt like a prisoner on parole, leaving his fellow inmates behind. The old timers threw me a party and wished me the best of luck. I knew they were envious. I'd managed to escape but they were stuck.

The delivery man in the elevator--he was stuck too. Yet he sang on his way to work.

"All those sorrowful faces," he said, shaking his head.

How was it, I wondered,  that some people kept on singing, while other just went on--silent?

"Have a good day, ya hear?" he said as the got off at the fifth floor. As the elevator door closed, I heard him humming a bluesy tune.

Maybe he was singing for all the others--the silent ones, the old timers, I mused. And I thought of his ancestors, how they sang in the cotton fields and how they called their songs "the sorrow songs."