When I started the job I had no intention of making trouble. The job involved “microform scanning.” This meant that I was checking microfilm records of various legal documents. I’d scroll along a spool of microfilm to make sure the document in each frame looked square. If it wasn’t square, that meant it was crushed or folded and had to be redone. Square: good. Squiggly: bad. That was it. Eight hours a day.
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I did this in a big room where two other women, a pregnant Italian madonna named Gabriela and a thin, high-strung high school dropout named June, also worked at computers. I have no idea what they did. They had been having a running feud with our supervisor about something for years, and my arrival was a catalyst for action.
“Bitch,” they whispered after she came in, ordered us to do something, and bounced out. “Hey, let’s see some more of those stories.”
