My Shoulder Chip

I was working in production at The News Leader when I was in my twenties, even though I really wanted to be a reporter. That wasn't happening. I had no mentors or connections, and without that, I needed to go to some small town and get experience on a little community newspaper. I just had a hard time accepting that truth when other people in production were being promoted upstairs to the newsroom. One girl was society-connected and went to a classy private women's college. She got the wedding desk job I applied for. The other was an unwashed hippie type who slept around and sold drugs to editors, so she was given a copy desk job, which actually turns out to be a dead end of the worst kind. The third had not even finished a degree in anything, but she was taken upstairs as a reporter. She was black. There were no black reporters. I guess they needed one.

So when I was given an opportunity to write for the employee newsletter, I thought that was my chance to gain some experience and acquire a mentor. The editor of the newsletter was a former News Leader editor who had been forced upstairs to the executive offices just to get him out of the newsroom when he reached retirement age and wouldn't step down to make room for new blood. I have no idea what he did other than the employee newsletter, which he never wrote any articles for. He just supervised it. It came out infrequently.

Over time, I realized, although he let me write the occasional feature story, mostly he wanted me to sit in his office while he told stories or pretended to work. He kept his door open so executives passing by would see me sitting in his office. One time he offered to drive me to my car, which was parked several blocks away from the newspaper office, and then circled the block around the newspaper several times before actually taking me there. It began to feel very creepy, like he wanted someone to see me driving away with him. I felt like an ornament, not a contributing member of his staff. And in the year or more I contributed to his paper, he never did a thing to advance my career in any way. Finally, I told him I could no longer freelance for him. I didn't have the time.

Not long after, I applied for a job as writer/editor for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board newsletter. That job would have changed my life. It was more money, more responsibility, and would have finally put me on the path to working in my chosen field. Without it, I spent another 15 years lanquishing in secretarial and assistant type jobs. I felt the interview had gone very well. When I didn't hear anything, I called and not only was I told I didn't get it, I was told why -- which is very unusual. Usually they just say another candidate was a better fit. One of my references said I had a "chip on my shoulder."

I was shocked, disappointed, chastised, and knew immediately which reference it was. For years, I slumped under the burden of that, and only today, three decades later, have I realized that although he meant that as a damning insult to ensure I didn't benefit from leaving him, it was actually a virture. It meant even at my young age, I felt confident in my ability. I felt I could do more and deserved to do more. I was too good to flirt with an aging old man and massage his ego. I felt I could stand on my own without a society college pedigree or trafficking in sex and drugs. I didn't need Affirmative Action to get a leg up.

But obviously I needed something, and that was the confidence to not let that man's comment rock my confidence like it did. I vowed I would go to his funeral and give him the evil eye in his casket, but it took him another 20 years to die, and by then I didn't care. Nobody did. Despite his illustrious career as an editor-terror through the 1950s and early part of the '60s, he barely got a mention in his own paper when he died.

I lived with that chip for just as long, realizing too late that it was actually the best thing about me.