In the morning
of April 2, 1970 I arrived by bus to Chicago, the city
which would become my first love with America. After
checking my luggage at the bus station's terminal, my
first order of business was to find a room that I could
rent. Through the Chicago Sun-Times paper, which I
bought at the station, I was able to find, late in the
afternoon, a room that I liked. It was in the North side
of the city close to Evanston. That entire part of the
city was heavily populated with Polish immigrants. The
rent for the room was, as in Pittsburgh, $50 a month. The
room was on the second floor of a house which was
occupied only by tenants. The owners of the house lived
in the next house as they owned three (3) consecutive
houses --one for them, the second for tenants (where I
was living), and the third house for their daughter,
son-in-law, and grandson.
Because of the
security deposit required on my rent, I had no other
option but to cash the $5000 check that I was carrying
from Pittsburgh. Extremely uncomfortable with using this
option of last resort, but nevertheless grateful to have
it, I pledged to myself that my very first priority would
be to put back the entire sum of $5000 and send it back
to Pittsburgh where it belonged. Thus, my first priority
was finding a job as soon as possible.
Next
day, on Friday, April 3, 1970, I went by subway (known in
Chicago as "The El" and standing for the Elevated Subway,
see picture at left) to the downtown area to the State's
Employment Agency in order to find a job. After I told
the clerk that from the time I was six (6) Astronomy
was the only thing that had interested me and that I had
a degree and working experience in it, I asked
him:
"What kind
of job could I get here in Astronomy?"
To this, the clerk
in disbelief of what he had just heard, said:
"You
could not be serious! You are kidding right? I have
openings for any kind of job, but Astronomy ...
give me a break!
Staring at him
without saying a word, the clerk eventually got the
message as soon afterwards he stated: OK, let me look
anyhow."
After a few minutes
of searching, the clerk, not believing what he had just
found, stated:
"Listen,
I see here that there is an opening at
Encyclopaedia Britannica for a Research Editor in
Astronomy, and the only thing that I see here in
terms of requirement is a good background in
Astronomy. I am going to give you the address which
is not too far from here. When you go to Britannica
have with you a Resume and dress appropriately to
look professional. Good luck."
After
giving me the address, I took immediately a taxicab to
Britannica. I had no idea what a Resume was, so when I
reached the Personnel Department of Britannica I stated
immediately to the woman that was there the
following:
"I
am here because the clerk from the Downtown
Employment Agency stated that you need somebody
with a good background in Astronomy."
Then, treating the
"Resume" as being some sort of disease, I stated to the
woman:
"And
I don't have a resume. Whatever that is, I am sure
that I don't have it!"
Upon hearing this,
the woman started laughing so hard that I could see her
crying of laughter! I did not know what to make of this.
After a few minutes, recovering from her laughter and
regaining her composure, she stated in a very friendly
voice:
"To
work for Britannica, you have to pass our test.
There is no exception to this. We do not care about
letters of references, fancy diplomas or anything
of that sort. For us, the most important thing is
the test which takes about two (2)
hours."
"What kind of test
do you have?" --I asked. To this, she
continued:
"Well,
if you apply for a Geography position, we have a
test in Geography, for Chemistry --we have a test
in Chemistry, and so on. You said that you want to
apply for an Astronomy position. For that we have a
test in Astronomy. Go home and prepare for this
test as you can be given this test only once. You
cannot come back and repeat the test until you
eventually pass. This is a one shot deal."
To this I
responded: "I want to take the test right now if this is
possible." The woman concerned with my answer stated:
"Are you sure that you want to take the test right now?",
to which I responded: "Yes, I am." Then she said: "OK
then, follow me."
She put me in a
room all by myself and the test was based on a multiple
choice format. There were 100 questions and each question
had associated with it five (5) possible answers
--one of which being the correct one. You had to be
completely out of your field not to recognize the correct
answer which was beaming right into your eyes! After
about 90 minutes, I informed the woman that I had
finished with my test. As I was prepared to leave, the
woman stopped me and said:
"Please
have a seat. I need to go into another room to
score your test. Then, I would like to talk with
you for a few minutes. Is this OK with you?"
Nodding my head in
the affirmative, the woman left with my test sheets to
another room. After about 10 minutes she returned and
informed me of my score by saying: "You made 98 out of a
hundred." To this, in disbelief, I stated to the woman:
"There was no way that I could have missed two questions.
Please go back in that room and check again." After that,
this dialog took place:
[Woman]:
"No,
you misunderstood me. You made a perfect
test."
[Me]: "If
it is so perfect, now what?"
[Woman]:
"Oh,
you will be called for an interview. And since you
did not know what a resume was, it is my job and my
responsibility to explain to you what an interview
is. In about ten (10) days you will receive a
postcard from us informing you of the place and the
time of the interview."
After the woman
from the Personnel Office explained to me the purpose,
the scope, and the format of a job interview, I knew that
I would not have a prayer in passing successfully such an
interview. The major culprit was my horrendous accent
which was so heavy that the great majority of people were
having a hard time understanding me. Any job I could have
conceived, but not the one of an Editor for the
prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica. I visualized that
in the moment that I would open my mouth, my interview
would be over as I could not have imagined a person who
would hire me for that position with the accent that I
had. And since I could not have gotten rid of my accent
overnight, I had to find a solution for this seemingly
insurmountable obstacle that I was facing.
Pondering over
these ideas, I took long walks in the city mostly to
observe how Americans behaved when they were engaged in a
conversation. And to my astonishment, by contrast to
Italians, I noticed that Americans, during a
conversation, do not use their hands at all as a form of
gesticulation but instead they use heavily their head,
nodding the head in a most prominent way and interjecting
so often with the awful "ah-uh!" sound. In my perception
that I was able to form from my visual observations, a
common American conversation in Chicago would look like
this: while one was talking, the other person very
frequently nodded his or her head and was saying "ah-uh!,
ah-uh!" repeatedly. When the conversation was over, the
person doing the talking would say to the other person
who said nothing except "ah-uh, ah-uh ", "Nice talking
with you!"
Based upon this
perception, I reasoned therefore that my only chance of
passing the upcoming interview was to employ the "ah-uh"
routine! Thus, my plan for the upcoming interview was as
follows: No matter what, throughout the entire interview
I would stick only to "ah-uh" interjections for as many
times as needed and then, at the very end, I would say a
simple sentence expressing my desire to work for
Britannica. And the sentence that I chose to use at the
end of my interview was that "I will be very happy to
have the opportunity to work for Encyclopaedia
Britannica." For hours and hours, for a week or so, I
rehearsed this very simple sentence. And to make sure
that people were able to understand me, I stopped a
number of them on the street and asked: "Do you know what
I am saying?" And some of those who chose to reply
stated: "Yes, that you are a nut!"
On Monday April 13,
1970, I got the postcard from Britannica that on
Thursday, April 16, I should come for an interview. I was
prepared with my script to the finest points. The
interview that I was scheduled to have was with the
Research Science Coordinator of Britannica--an extremely
nice woman in her late twenties or early thirties, an
American born of Swedish descent. The woman, in an
extremely friendly voice, began congratulating me on my
excellent score on the Astronomy test and on my knowledge
of so many languages (Hungarian, French, Italian,
Romanian, Russian, and English). Then, she
stated:
"Listen,
when an article comes to Britannica, we have an
English Editor, a Grammar Editor, a Punctuation
Editor, a Layman Editor --in all some
seven (7) editors. When we get an article in
Astronomy, we need somebody with a strong Astronomy
background to check, after all the editing has been
done, whether the edited article is sound from a
scientific standpoint. You see, sometimes the
English Editor in rearranging the structure of a
sentence may, inadvertently, destroy the scientific
meaning or the entire content of that sentence. Or,
we may have other situations where a diagram or a
formula has been misplaced from one page into
another. Since no one knows the Astronomy stuff
those errors would not be detected by any of us. It
is therefore your job to make sure that the text
makes sense from a scientific point of view, that
the text and diagrams correspond, and so on.. You
forget about the grammar, you forget about the
punctuation, you need only be concerned that the
text is making sense from the scientific point of
view and nothing else."
I acknowledged all
this with "ah-uh" and the nodding of my head as needed.
The woman then went on explaining to me how the Research
Department was the core of Britannica and how other
departments were integrated with each other and with the
research center. After some 45 minutes of countless
"ah-uh" on my part and recognizing that the woman had
exhausted every imaginable subject with respect to this
opening and that the interview was about to be over, I
stated to her "You know what!" to which the woman hearing
me for the first time speaking exclaimed: "What?" To
this, following my script, I said:
"I
will be very happy to have the opportunity to work
for Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"You got the job!
--the woman replied. You will start to work on Monday
[April 20, 1970]. Congratulations!"
Extremely happy of
the outcome, I left her office with a simple "Thank You."
A tremendous door of opportunities had just been opened
for me. My title "Research Editor in Astronomy for
Encyclopaedia Britannica" sounded really good. I was on
cloud nine!
