During that time, I had continued to work a few evenings a week at the T-shirt store. In addition to going to clean up the elderly lady’s house on Saturdays. Next to the T-shirt store, there was a little restaurant that had happy hour. It was not very clear to me what that meant at the time. Anyway, some nights when I went to work at the T-shirt place, I would stop to fill up my plate with shrimps and take it to have something to nibble at the store. They didn’t charge me anything. One night, right before closing time at 9, I had a customer who couldn’t decide what he wanted. I was rather impatient to leave. So, when the man finally decided what design he wanted imprinted, I took the shirt, put it on the imprinting machine but didn’t lock it completely on top of the shirt. When I let the handle go, it snapped back and hit me in the eye. A flood of blood started to pour and I didn’t know whether I had lost an eye or what. I was too afraid to feel anything. The customer left in a hurry. I called my mother at home to tell her that I had been in an accident. I was not very precise what had happened and my mother thought it was a car accident. I then called my employer and he told me to call 911. All that time, I was holding tissues to my eye and they were quickly drenched in blood. The ambulance came at the same time with my sponsor and his son. My mother had dispatched them. The son drove my car to the hospital. There they had to sew my eyebrow. I had been lucky. My eyebrow had been split open, not my eye. But the force of the impact gave me a huge bruise and swelling that closed my eye. It stayed like that for almost a month.
After that I drove myself home. And I called my then boyfriend in Romania (presently my husband) to tell him the news. It was the night for me to call. I always called the last Saturday of the month.
I continued working at the T-shirt place through a change of ownership. The new owner was a Korean woman who introduced me to sushi, which I came to love. I worked for her until she dismissed me. She said she would work there herself. It was a one-person store.
After my dismissal from the clinic, a few months passed and I didn’t find another job. I was getting rather anxious. So, when the unemployment office mentioned a state-run and state-paid program for the unemployed that wanted to learn new skills, I jumped at the opportunity. I was screened and found eligible. Fifty or sixty people who were unemployed, former drug addicts, former convicts or otherwise hard to place individuals, including myself were taken to a kind of retreat where we had inspirational music, tearful confessions of past mistakes, greatest accomplishments, etc. All of this seemed highly fake to me but I went along because I really wanted the training.
I was enrolled in a program that would prepare you to become a word processing operator. We would start and end every day of training with a chorus of “I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel terrific!” yelled at the top of our voices. Then we would split into groups and study office procedures, typing and then computer word processing. There were frequent tests. As usual, I did well, with the exception of typing. I couldn’t use all my fingers and my speed was terrible. Being very competitive, I felt bad. The more so, because there was a young girl in the program who was born with extremely short hands and with just 2-3 fingers. She was typing better than I was. It got me so upset that I would start to cry and had to leave the room to calm down. I was very good in the computer work.
Just before losing my job at the clinic, I had started to take some pre-requisite courses (Calculus and Basic Computer Programming) because I had hopes to enroll in a Master’s Program in Business Administration. Although the girls put me down and laughed and said that I was crazy to think that I would manage to pass calculus and go on to get an advanced degree, I continued. Their words did not discourage me. On the contrary.
The Romanian man who had given us a small black and white TV when we arrived encouraged me to go for an MBA. He bought me books that would prepare you for the GMAT exam. I studied them religiously, and when I finished one book, I started again. When I took the exam, I was rather good at it. I passed with a good score. I was quite used to taking exams. During my job searches I had taken exams for federal or state jobs. I always scored well but wasn’t hired, but placed on waiting lists.
I realized quite early that my Bachelor’s degree in English from Romania would not serve me in any way in the States. It was good because I knew the language but it seemed ridiculous to even think that I could teach English to native speakers. On the other hand, my mother’s pharmacy degree would have been quite useful, had it not been for numerous exams that she had to pass before being able to practice again. On my mother’s feats, a little later.
The people in the Word Processing School were very friendly. We kept in touch even after graduation and even went out to eat together. But just before graduation, one of my colleagues told me that she saw an ad in the paper for a word processor in a medical facility. She thought that I would be good for that given my prior involvement with the medical world. I applied and was offered the job. That was a great accomplishment. (va urma)
