Company IDs and How I Met My Husband

My very first company ID

When I began working for The Telephone Company back when there was only one, we were issued IDs. You can see the low level of importance by the way they affixed my photo all askew.

Over the years, the company became more security conscious, and we were required to clip our IDs to our clothing whenever on company property.

It was a rare occasion when anybody would actually look at this identification, mainly when we were required to visit the San Ramon complex which came to be known as the Death Star.

A co-worker, I'll call her Ronnie (mainly because that was her name) decided to paste a photograph of Alfred E. Newman (from Mad Magazine) over her ID picture.

She'd been wearing this altered ID for quite a while when she was summoned to the Death Star for some class or another. Upon entering, visitors were required to show their ID at the nearest desk and proceed on. The guard glanced at Ronnie's photo ID, never noticing the picture was of a white male, and a famous one at that! Ronnie was an Asian female...

For much of my career, I worked in the central office environment, along with the telephone switching equipment. Most of these buildings had no windows, and if they did, they were bulletproof glass.

Everyone who had a need to access one of these buildings was issued a key.

As the company became more security conscious, they issued new swipe-card style IDs and took away our old keys.

In their infinite wisdom (?), the swipe-cards were not issued to many of our outside techs who occasionally needed access to the central office.

My job as a facility tech was a busy one, to say the least, and this serious ommision of entry required us to add the job of door man to our resumes.

I was extremely aggravated one day, and trying to get some work done at our computer terminal which was about 350 feet from the entrance door, when the buzzer summoned me back to the door (for the umpteenth time that day.)

Now irate, I opened the door to challenge this person to show their ID.

I did happen to notice this guy (I'd never seen before) was tall and very nice looking, but did that appease my anger? No!

A big smile lit up his face, and I could see that horndog look in his eyes. Great, now I'm really pissed.

He says, with that look in his eyes, "Oh, who are you?" (OK, now he's a slimy horndog.)

Sweetheart that I am, I replied "Who the hell are you? I need some ID here!"

I ended up having to assist the horndog with some testing, and he actually listened to the reasons for my stress, and commiserated!

We became friends, and later married.

It's been just over 13 years since we were married, and ever so often he'll look at me and say "Remember... Who the hell are you?"

Oh, I do!