The Birds!

Way back when, when I was a chemist in the QA lab at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, I worked with lady named Hattie. Hattie was one of the two administrative assistants (but she was of an era that she preferred the term "secretary") in an office staffed with crazy chemists and a couple of slightly-less-insane metallurgists. But everyone there knew that all of our degrees and schooling did not change the fact that Hattie was the ranking person in the lab. She eclipsed us all in both age and number of years working at the shipyard, but her attitude was the real reason for her supremacy.

At that point in time, I often wondered why Hattie had not long since retired. She was a widow and, while not wealthy, was certainly financially secure. But I now realize that she really had a good deal going. Her only official responsibilities were to check in samples brought into the lab for testing and to answer the phone. The rest of her day was split between watching our antics (I’ll save those stories for another day), keeping Sally (the other administrative assistant who always wore pastel-colored, velour sweat suits that were the antithesis of her personality) in line and reading the Bible. With her civil service seniority, Hattie was probably getting paid more than I was as a chemist.

Every morning the sailors from the ships being repaired at the shipyard and those based at the adjacent Naval station, would bring in samples of fuel to be tested in the lab. For decades, Hattie checked in the samples using pen and paper, but “recently” the lab had switched to an all-computerized system (this change occured at least five years prior to my working there, but civil service years are the opposite of dog years with seven solar years being equal to one civil service year) . Hattie would sit down in front of her computer terminal, press some keys, hit "enter" just once and the whole system would crash. Every single time. Then my dear friend and co-worker, ADD, would have to reboot the lab’s server, while Hattie would disdainfully look at us and ask what we did this time to the database to break it.

Luckily, Hattie always fared better with the phone and intercom system. There were about twenty of us working there with only one main phone line into the lab. Of course, being a bunch of scientists we really were not that popular and did not get many calls, but the phone would still ring pretty much all day long. Hattie always answered the line and then, over the intercom, announced who needed to pick up the phone. The senior metallurgist, with the last name of DeVries, received the majority of the phone calls since he did most of the failure analysis for the shipyard. Typically, once an hour, I’d hear Hattie over the intercom announcing: “Devrie, Devrie, line one”. At this, ADD would always yell from his lair in the back lab: “Where is the S?” “What happened to the S?!?” (For you DR.com readers – perhaps this is the source of the S’s that keep appearing on the end of Chef Power’s name?) I never had the nerve to ask Hattie why she consistently mispronounced that name, but I wonder if Mr. DeVries or ADD had somehow incurred her wrath…

And Hattie was a person that you certainly did not want to cross. I found that out one slow afternoon when she started talking to me about her husband. She told me of the months and months of painful suffering her husband had endured before dying of stomach cancer. I opened my mouth to say that I was sorry they both had to go through that, but before I could get the words out, Hattie then added… “and he deserved every minute of that agony because God was punishing him for how he lived his life.” I just stood there with my mouth open, while Hattie nodded to me and walked back to read her Bible at her desk.

Only once did I see Hattie behave in a less than dignified manner. Early one morning, just as I had arrived for the day, I was met with the sight of Hattie running toward me, waving her arms above her head and yelling “the birds, the birds!” She flew right past me without pausing and slammed shut the door to the front office (until that point, I had not even realized there was a door to that office). With great trepidation, I ventured on in the direction of the origin of Hattie’s trajectory – the fuel QA lab. That door was also shut (and was the second door that morning that I was surprised to see actually existed). With Hitchcockian imagery flitting about my mind, I peered through the glass window into the lab and saw… a mourning dove.

On warm days, we’d open the windows in the fuel QA lab to let out some of the ever-present fumes and someone had forgotten to close the windows the evening before. Apparently a dove had ventured into the lab and, when Hattie went to deliver the day’s fuel samples, she startled it and the bird began to fly around. Luckily, our resident environmentalist chemist (a graduate of CSU Humboldt, no less) captured the hapless dove under a lab coat and released it back out the window. However, it took a bit longer to unruffle Hattie’s feathers that day.

But those shipyard days are a long time past for both Hattie and me. It has been fourteen years since I got married, followed my husband to his new duty station and left that job. I don’t know what ever happened to Hattie. She probably finally retired from civil service when the shipyard shut down almost ten years ago, but I suspect she held out for a hefty bonus resulting from her job being eliminated during the closure. And, although she would be easily into her 90’s by now, I like to picture Hattie still keeping order somewhere, making sure everyone is doing their job and imperious to the very end.