The bottom half of my white dress shirt was covered with black toner ink. Less than a month into my stint in the typing pool at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was earning my reputation as the paper’s worst clerk EVER!
It was some time in December 1988, and my first son was a few months away from being born. I was still on probation in the newsroom, so I knew that walking around with an untucked, sopping wet shirt now smeared gray after a trip to the bathroom to wipe and wring it out was a bad look.
No one made eye contact with me. It was as if my failure to fit in to the city desk’s ecosystem was so obvious, thanks to my oppositional disorder, that keeping me around for even another day was an act of cruelty for them and me.
