Kevorkian Center, New York University. September 1988
How I got a job one day in New York City
September 1988. In the months previous in Washington, I had signed up for a temp agency which landed me with the League of Women Voters. They liked me so much that they gave me a contract position to help with their annual convention. Overall, it was a great experience, so I figured in New York I would do the same. I signed up for a temp agency in Midtown and went out for a few jobs. I realized quickly it was NOT working out. In fact, I was in a panic. Brian and I had committed to rent on a place and I was responsible for 50%. Working as a temp "occasionally' was just not going to allow me to pull my weight. On a whim I took the train down to New York University to look for a job in person. I had worked in administration as a student at Georgetown, maybe I would get lucky?
My first stop was the Linguistics Department. I met a woman, the administrator, who told me that although there were no jobs available in her department, she heard that in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature they were in dire need of a person in her position. Apparently, the former administrator had quit in a huff. She said, "It can't hurt to check it out. I heard the Chairman is desperate." She pointed me to the right building and I walked across campus. In an ultra-modern, bunker-like building just off of Washington Square, I took the elevator to the third floor.
I walked inside a small office and found Dr. Michael Carter, a very professorial-looking Oxford man, who appeared a little frantic to put it mildly. He really didn't even acknowledge me and then I told him I was looking for a job - he stopped in his tracks. He asked me a few questions about my experience and then abruptly questioned, "what did you study in university?" My heart sank because I thought, "well, here is the moment that my atypical major is NOT going to help me". I replied, "Linguistics". He said, "Me too, you are hired". I was dumbstruck. I had walked to NYU and gotten a job on the spot!
Mike sent me off to "Personnel" (the precursor to HR as oldsters recall) to meet "Liz", the director there. She immediately told me "sorry, you can't really be hired that way, there is a process". I was not ready to give up, so I had her call Mike. Mike apparently told her he needed someone IMMEDIATELY and said "make it happen". Liz was adamant. Mike then called the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who subsequently called Liz and - I was hired. Liz, in fact, became a good friend in my time at NYU. I cannot fault her for following the rules, or at least trying to. The bane of my next two jobs at the university was getting the professors to follow any kind of process. She was an excellent mentor when it came time for me to hire secretaries during my administrative tenure in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and later in the Sociology Department.
The year and a half I worked in NELL I learned an amazing amount about office management, university politics, and the Middle East. At the time, I thought all that cultural knowledge was "jeopardy-useful". Little did I know that 25 years later I would be working in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, drawing a LOT from that early experience! In addition, during that time I came to know the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, Dr. Piotr Chelkowski, who became a friend. I visited him and his wife in Venice when he was a visiting scholar there several years years later. In the days following 911 when we lost access to our apartment for 11 days, we slept on his living room sofa in Silver Towers, part of the faculty housing at NYU.
Things really do happen for a reason, I think. Some experiences continue to reverberate throughout our lives.
NB: The photo is of the lobby of the building. Piotr loved the lobby and adjacent Near Eastern Library which incorporated leftover parts of a medieval Damascene House, the bulk of which is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (donated by the Kevorkians). The exterior of the Kevorkian Center, as Piotr quipped, "looked like a leftover of the Maginot Line". The interior, however, was one of the finest in all of the university and it was where the Department and the Center threw their many parties. On my insistence, those parties were all catered by the nearby (and now defunct), Balducci's. My catering became legend. Those were some good times.