Working life

When I finished highschool in 1967 I didn't have a clear-cut idea what to do next. In those times there were no attendings in school to advice you to make a choice as I saw with my children later on. So the usual options for a girl were to become a secretary, a nurse or a teacher. Neither of them attracted me, but I had to make a decision and went to a one year education for receptionist. I had vague images of working in a hotel with foreign people from all over the world visiting Amsterdam.

This is my class, I am the one on the floor on the left with the long hair. The lessons were not so interesting, you learned some secretary things like answering a phonecall and other in my eyes not so important subjects. The only thing I liked were the type-lessons with the old typewriters. I learned it very well and reached a high speed. After a year I had my diploma with three certificates of speaking English, French and German languages. Now I had to find a job. 

My first job was not in a hotel but at a trade-company for expensive watches and Parker pens in this old building above a famous cigar shop at the Rokin.  At my very first day I was sitting at the reception desk with the receptionist who showed me around what to do. Suddenly there was a  lot of noise going on, a colleague had locked herself in a toilet and didn't respond at knocking and shouting. When the door was finally broked open they found her with her wrists cut! She was not deadly harmed and was transported to a hospital. I felt I was watching a movie, this was a quite different world than school-life. I found out it had to do with a broken love-affair between a boss and his secretary.  After 14 days I came to the conclusion this was not my type of work, it was boring and I was all alone behind a desk, nobody to talk to, so I moved on. A few weeks later I read in a paper that one of the bosses had a deadly car accident at a closed level crossing in which he was beheaded. That  company had a bad karma!

I found another job at a publisher of magazines, "The Ilustrated Press".They published various magazines, a womans weekly "Margriet" mens weekly, childrens weekly, a comic magazine and a monthly glossy magazine "Avenue" with beautiful photos I showed  you in yesterdays post. I worked with a team of colleagues at the service department to answer the questions of the readers. I was amazed that so many people wrote letters to a magazine with all kind of questions about raising children, recepies and marriage problems.

Most questions came for the womans magazine "Margriet" ( Marguerite), the name of a flower as well a girls name. Writers considered the magazine as a friend and always started their letters with "Dearest Margriet".
 We all had a sort of specialities to answer and mine was the cooking and housekeeping! Can you imagine, I was 19, lived still at my parents and could only bake an egg and use the vacuum cleaner. But I learned to use an archive or went to the editorial offices to ask for answers.
We were living in the moving sixties and times and society were quickly changing. We had the sexual revolution and the feminists power movement, so "Margriet" changed the articles about  houskeeping to more relevant issues for women. The letters from the readers also changed and they had questions about all kind of personal and social problems now. The magazine had a column called "Margriet weet raad" (Margriet gives advice) which had a great response. Our work changed too and we became a kind of social workers with the advices of professionals of course. 

Here a few of my colleagues, we all had typewriters and worked 8 hours a day.

And this is an image of the office room in 1968, no computers yet, just the good old typewriters.

I had nice colleagues of the same age and we had friendly relationships with each other, had drinks together in a cafe and celebrated birthdays. I am on the right with Anja and the only boy in the room Tjerk.

Sometimes we were a bit fed up with typing all day long and had a funny dance together, me second from left. A nice advantage of working for  this publisher was the end of the week when everybody got a package of six magazines to take home for free. My family was always delighted when I came home with all the magazines for the weekend. I worked there for seven years with much pleasure until I got pregnant and quit the working life six weeks before giving birth to my daughter and started a new life as a mother.