The Interview by Gillian

In 1965/66 IBM built their facility in Boulder, and in roughly twelve months hired 4,000 people.

Those were the days!

I could no more get a job with IBM these days than I could sprout wings and fly to Mars, but back then you basically just had to walk through the door.

I remember very little about what was probably the most important interview of my life, except that it was very short and it was followed up by a test.

Now I know that computer programming and complex math is leaping into your heads, but remember in 1965 IBM was hiring assembly personnel to do the kind of work that has long since been outsourced to far off countries. I think a few of us are old enough to recall when we actually did that work here?

Those were the days!

Anyway, this test was not exactly sophisticated.

I was given a pencil and a piece of paper covered in tiny circles perhaps a tenth of an inch in diameter. I was given three minutes to place a pencil dot inside as many circles as possible.

That was it.

Those were the days!

Apparently my eye-hand coordination was deemed sufficient, and I began my employment at $82.00 a week, more than I had ever earned or ever dreamed of. After all a first-class stamp cost five cents, a McDonald’s hamburger fifteen, a dozen eggs fifty cents and you could buy a  house for $15,000. 

Those were the days!

I spent thirty wonderful years with IBM, doing many different jobs, all of which I loved, and getting several promotions. 

I traveled extensively on business in this country and to several others, obtaining skills which enabled me to travel again to foreign countries in a volunteer capacity during retirement.

At IBM I met the man who was to be my husband, and an irretrievably straight woman with whom I fell madly in love. She is now with her third husband and I am happily, incredibly, with the wonderful Ms. Betsy, but Mo and I continue to love each other like sisters after fifty years.

I came out at IBM, hardly an adventure as IBM was one of the first corporations to include GLBTs in it’s non-discrimination directive, and to offer benefits to same-sex couples.

Of course I cannot hazard a guess as to where my life might have gone had I failed that interview and that challenging dot test, but it is hard for me to imagine a better life than the one I had, and a great deal of it involved IBM.

That your life should turn on pencil dots in tiny circles!

Those were the days!

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.