“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” ~ Alan Watts

In April of 2004, the Office of Mental Health was located on Holland Avenue, near the sprawling premises of Albany Med. I was contacted for an interview with the training division, which was not in the main office building. Located in a dark lower corner of the Capital District Psychiatric Center (picture netting over places where someone might be able to jump, and a lock-down security system that required a pass to open every door), it was quite a change of pace from the quiet Thruway office. Andy somewhat jokingly worried/hoped that they might mistake me for a patient and keep me there. I didn’t mind any of it – there was covered parking, with a completely covered walkway to go into the building. Never again would I have to clean snow off the car or burn my ass on leather that had baked in the blazing sun of July on a field of asphalt for eight hours.

In a padded, circular room, I was interviewed by the woman who would be my supervisor, Suzanne. We clicked immediately, and it impressed upon me the importance of an interview. In almost every instance of being offered an interview, I would be offered a job. In many of these cases I didn’t have the exact experience or background that was being sought, but I conveyed that I could learn, and that I could get along with people. That has always been more important than finding someone who knows absolutely everything about what they will be doing, and I was lucky that most people saw that and understood. Almost every single awful office situation I’ve encountered has been caused by difficult people, not by people who didn’t know what they were doing.

My would-be supervisor Suzanne was quirky, friendly, and ready to laugh. She had bright eyes that sparkled with a sense of mischief, and she was warm-hearted and generous. I felt safe around her, as well as entertained. She was a convivial trainer, engaging and gregarious, and as long as she was my supervisor I knew the job would be ok. This points out the importance of supervision: a supervisor can make or break someone’s career. A couple of days later they called and offered me the position – a Keyboard Specialist 2 – Grade 9. I was moving up in the state world at last! It wasn’t swift, but I took as many exams as I could. It was enough to be employed and contributing to the mortgage, and I was also building a retirement and gaining other benefits. Boring stuff at the time, but I knew it would be a good thing in the long run, should I be lucky enough to last.

My first greeting in the psych center was by a gruff bald guy with a familiar gravelly voice that I couldn’t quite place, but was certain I knew. He introduced himself as Joe, then came closer to whisper in my ear, “It’s Hazel, you asshole!” to reveal himself as the Empress of Albany. He was my favorite drag queen – one of the original mothers of the Albany drag queen circuit, and I was so relieved to see someone I knew that I immediately felt at home. Quickly, I made friends with the woman working next to me, Tina, and then Kate. Friends came faster now, and for the first time I didn’t do my usual panic calculation of how long it had taken me to be at ease in other jobs.  

On the nice days when spring led into summer, we would take lunch breaks and walk along New Scotland Avenue, grabbing pizza at The Fountain or getting subs at one of the local Italian delis that lined the street. When the weather was rainy, we would take the walkway to the cafeteria at Albany Med, joining the throngs of students and medical staff that populated the busy lunch hour. It was a good location, and even better than that it was, for the most part, a good office in which to work. I proved myself a decent performer, and when an opportunity to travel to Brooklyn for a training conference came along, they offered some of the administrative tasks to me, and I got to take a train and book a hotel for the event. Prior to this, I hadn’t given much thought or care to what I wore to work. {Pause for shock and awe.} My idea of casual wear was khakis and a sweater, which put me eons ahead of the majority of the state work force. For this event, when I’d be representing our office in public, I put on an olive-hued suit, a white shirt, and a burgundy tie. My co-workers had never seen me dress up quite that much, and I did so well (inadvertently impressing some apparently-important people) that their surprise at my ability had me wondering what kind of loser they thought I was before that day. There was a lesson in that too: I learned the importance of dressing up for the job, even when it wasn’t necessary.

People always say to dress for the job you want to have, and I always dismissed the notion as so much silly nonsense. Spoiler alert: it’s not. As much as I like to dress up, underneath it all I’ve always believed that each of us has the right to wear whatever the hell we want to wear. The idea of appropriate attire is a social construct that I played with and ultimately railed against, but on that day of the conference, with a new attendant respect and admiration, I realized the power of appearance. While I will always believe in the right of self-expression, I suddenly realized there was a game to play as well, and if you knew how to play the game without sacrificing yourself, you could use it to your advantage. People who rebel simply because they can never go very far. My office attire got a more professional revamping after that, and the result was a boon to my own confidence, and a boost in my happiness, all of which led to greater bonhomie within my work unit. 

My years of retail had shaped what limited people skills I had, and they seemed to be working. At least, I think I was getting better at it. My strength was in being entertaining and humorous, while also being reliable and loyal. I was punctual (actually, I was most often early) and I didn’t abuse my vacation time. More important than these traits, however, was the fact that I could get along with just about everybody. I may play a cantankerous grumpy guy, but beneath it all, when it really counts, people seemed to enjoy my presence. That goes much further than exemplary excellence in a refined niche. To this day, I would rather hire someone who can get on well with others than someone who knows everything inside and out but is miserable to be around.

I got to know the group at the Office of Mental Health better at a few outside gatherings. This was another office populated almost entirely by women (and a drag queen) and with it came its own set of dramas and issues. Again, I managed to skirt most of them, and if there were times when I delved into the drama, it was my own choice. My comfort level with an office grew quicker here, or maybe I was just becoming more comfortable with myself. This was also the first time since my days in retail and John Hancock where my co-workers became friends whom I saw outside of work. That could come with its own stickiness, but I managed to avoid those dramas, even as they would occasionally stir storms around me.

Still, as much as I enjoyed the people there, a promotion did not seem to be on the horizon, so I kept my eyes and ears open for whatever the universe was nudging me towards. At the start of that year’s holiday season – November of 2004 – I sent up a few flares at a party that would change my life and turn my job at the state of New York into an actual career…

{See Part One and Part Two.}

“I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work: the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” – Joseph Conrad

It was at another party – a clear indication of the value of social networking – where I spoke with our friend Paul about getting out of the Department of State into any other agency, and he said his friend at the Thruway Authority was looking for a Keyboard Specialist. I had an interview in a few weeks, and since my score was immediately reachable I was able to transfer before my first year at the Department of State was up.

It was April 2002 and the spring seemed a fitting time to begin another new position. I went from an office filled almost entirely with women to an office filled almost entirely with men. I was told that the differences between working with women versus men were severe, but I scoffed at such a notion, dismissing it as a piece of antiquated artificial social construction that at best was ignorant and, at worst, blatantly sexist. Here, the guys had their disagreements, but they had them out before quickly, and genuinely, moving on. There wasn’t a secret passive-aggressive agenda lurking beneath their every interaction, and when there was disagreement or drama it was dealt with head-on and finished. I fought against these stereotypical notions, as they mostly came from other people, but I did notice discernible differences, and not only because of gender.

This office was much more quiet. Eerily quiet, which for me was a beautiful thing. Ensconced across the street from the main Thruway Authority building, our little Office of Construction and Contracts was in a satellite station that had its own parking within thirty feet of the door.

That meant I could drive myself to work.

There was a new independence in that. I look back and think how young I was then – even if I already felt old – only twenty-six and on my second state job. Was that good or bad? Oprah once said when she started out that if she was making her age (in thousands of dollars) she felt she was doing ok. I was just about there, but I was still scared.

The same fear and trepidation and social anxiety that marked the first days at every job I’d held accompanied me here. I’d just made a few friends at the Department of State, just started to feel comfortable in my surroundings, and now I had to start all over again. I played the time calculation game I usually played, trying to figure out how many days and weeks it would take to feel comfortable again, how long it took the last time, and what the estimated time of ease in this job would arrive.

Luckily, I adored my new supervisor Clarice from our first moments working together. She was all business up front, but I learned if I could break through and make her laugh, she opened up into a warm and hilarious woman. We made a good team, keeping things organized and running smoothly, and it was a lesson in how the clerical support team really ran the basic functions of an office.

A few bad state workers have given the whole lot of us a bad name over the years, but in my growing experience with the state I was finding out that most of the people wanted to do good work, and make a difference in whatever office they were in. They took pride in their work and wanted to contribute. For someone that considered office work solely as a means to pay our mortgage, this was a revelation, and I began to develop a profound respect for all kinds of state work. When an opening for a support person opened up in the office next door in my same title, Clarice pushed me to make it my own. About a year had passed since I first took the job at the Thruway Authority. Another spring was at hand, and outside the land was shaking free of winter. It was planting season, and at our new house I sprinkled a handful of morning glory seeds into the ground. This was a serene and calm point in our lives, even with new work moves afoot. The morning glories would sprout and wind their way up and along a new wooden fence that lined the pool. Spring slipped into summer garb, and seasons passed.

There was a little wooded area near our office building, and at lunch I would walk and examine the plants that were once again coming to life. Summer bloomed into fall, and as the morning glories went to seed, the sky deepened and the goldenrod began its bloom. It was emblematic of the peaceful time I was enjoying at the job, made more-so by a move to a new desk and new director, Pete.

Pete was one of the best people I have ever worked for, and not only because he taught me how to properly decorate a Christmas tree with lights (from the trunk outward). His daughter Kristi worked for the Times Union and would often call, which is how I got to meet her. She and her Mom also attended the holiday lunch that Pete put on every year, carrying in crock pots and hot plates and all sorts of good stuff. Despite being different in many areas (he towered at least two feet above me and loved golf) Pete shared my life-view on a number of unlikely things. (We both preferred drumsticks to wings when it came to Buffalo chicken, for example.) He supervised with a light touch, and things in his office worked out with relative ease. Affable yet effective, he ran an office that respected him, and I learned that being genial could be as powerful as being stern when it came to supervising people.

As much as I loved it there, I was already on the eligible list for a promotion, and I had managed to squeak out another reachable score for the Keyboard Specialist 2 exam. Another spring arrived – the spring of 2004 – and my state career was about to land me right in the Capital District Psychiatric Center, but not as a patient as Andy always feared (hoped?)…

{See Part One.}

“Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself… His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.” – Herman Hesse

The year was 2001.

The season was summer – late summer.

The world as we once knew it was about to change forever.

The morning of August 30 dawned in slightly foggy form. The morning glories I had trained onto Andy’s house didn’t know whether to open or close, confused as to whether the day was ending or beginning. These morning glories would greet me faithfully for those first few weeks of work. They would also follow us – or rather we would bring them along – when we moved to our first home together. I loved their resilience, the way they bloomed even more the worse you treated them, the less you pampered them.

Andy pulled the car out and I paused in the driveway, taking a deep breath before my first day at a new job. In one hand I held a folder of various documents and a pen, in my other was a lunch that Andy had made. I didn’t even have a work bag then. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The start of a new job doesn’t usually happen on the first day at work. It begins weeks and months before that…

It actually started, as so many fortuitous things did in those days, at a party at Rob’s. New to Andy, new to Albany, and relatively new to the shark-accented social circles that the gay world at the turn of the millennium provided, I was a novice to most everything. Back then I thought all the gay couples we met would stay together, and I looked up to them as role models. Would Andy and I stay together for a year? Two? Little did I know then that the window I saw before me was a temporary and disappointingly minor slice of our lives. None of those other couples would last, which made me thankful to be in the realm of casual friendship with all involved.

It was New Year’s Eve. The vodka and cranberry was overflowing from my red solo cup, people wore paper hats and glasses shaped like ‘2001’, and the mood was celebratory and cozy near the fire. I was talking with Jim, who was one of the friendliest (and most drama-free) of the new people I met through Andy. Somehow we got to talking about employment and suddenly they were printing out the application for the New York State Civil Service Test for Keyboard Specialist. I filled it out right then and there, and stuffed it in an envelope. The seeds of my state career had been planted, and as we counted down to the exit of another year, 2001 dawned to cheers and kisses and hope on a chilly wind.

The exam was a piece of cake. I took it in Amsterdam since that was still technically my residence in upstate New York. Then there was one last summer of freedom, spent with Andy between Albany and Boston. The gears of the state moved then, as they often do now, at an infuriatingly-glacial-like pace. It would be months before the results were in, but once I received my score of 100, the canvass letters began to pour in. Foolishly, because I didn’t know any better, I took the first one that was offered – a Data Entry Machine Operator, even in the face of others that would have brought me up to a Grade 9 after a year. Such was my early ignorance of the Civil Service system. I took the Grade 5 position and moved forward without question. Those mis-steps and mistakes would ultimately serve me well, as I learned first-hand what it was like to be a state employee, and all the accompanying Civil Service laws that went with it. When I would eventually swerve into the Human Resources lane, I’d have invaluable experience and first-hand knowledge under my belt. I didn’t know that then, so I felt the same frustration and confusion that many people new to state service feel.

The Department of State, then located at the corner of State Street and Broadway in downtown Albany, did something with licenses as far as I could tell. (Hint to other would-be employees: research and look into wherever you may be interviewing – it impresses almost everyone and you end up looking less like an idiot than I did.) Andy thought I would like it downtown, where there were more things to do within walking distance during the day than in the sprawling suburbia of Guilderland. The history and older buildings did appeal to me, hinting at what I loved so much about Boston, albeit on a much smaller and less grand scale. They folded up the sidewalks after 5 PM, but we would be back on the road by that time.

My first supervisor was named Mary Beth. She was a quiet and kind woman, younger than the stereotypical state worker I had in my mind. With hair puffed up in front and feathered on the sides, her head was stuck in the 80’s but she knew her job and work. The woman who headed up our unit – something to do with licensing that I never quite could piece together, even after working there for a few months – was named Joan. She was, to put it politely, awful. These two extremes, Mary Beth and Joan, initiated me into the wildly-vacillating nature of state work.

Joan was wicked in almost every way. She had thick coke-bottle glasses, an equally thick frame, and dry patches on her arms that flaked off when she scratched them, which was often. She had a pillow on her chair, presumably to ease the pain of being such a pain in the ass, and everyone hated her. She was especially cruel to the guy who I sensed was disabled in some way. He was always kind and kept to himself, but she would go after him for the littlest things. He was one of the only other men in the office, which at first I loved, because I always seemed to get on better with women than men, but soon learned to loathe when it became apparent that this was not some dreamy Barbizon scene with people preening like decorative peacocks. Or maybe it was, given the nasty nature I’m told peacocks have.

Whether it was my maleness or naive ignorance that acted as a shield, I managed largely to avoid the drama and in-fighting that soon revealed themselves after a honeymoon of a few hours. Factions took up against factions, and friendliness was less an act of good-nature and more likely a planned alliance for a battle to come. It was stressful, even for someone who mostly steered clear of all the drama, but I befriended a couple of women who allowed me to join them on their smoke breaks (even if I didn’t smoke) – they found my use of big words entertaining, even if they didn’t know what I was saying half the time. They introduced me to more people, and within a couple of months I felt at home. It would be one of my strengths: endearing myself to an office and acting as a social lubricant. People seemed to get a kick out of me, and I proved myself a reliable worker who was on time, dependable, and did as he was told without question or challenge. (And some, I’m sure, found me annoying and obnoxious as hell. It takes all kinds.)

Despite my growing friendships with a few co-workers, there are toxic workplaces that can’t be easily fixed. Thanks to the agitated shadow that Joan threw over the place, and the gossipy groups that were constantly pitting people against each other, as well as a growing understanding of having to look at possible promotional opportunities, I knew it was time to seek out other options. The winding road of my state career was about to take its first major turn…

{To be continued.}