Billie Abbott:  

Former member of the Mount Eden Science Fiction club (1980), geek should be my middle name. After about fifteen years of struggling to survive in the wilds of Hayward I finally got a job that looked something like a career path. I became first the Office Manager of a patent illustrating business and finally a patent illustrator for about 7 years. First, a little background: I was introduced to drafting by the principle of Mount Eden because I wanted to take the shop class but my instructor didn't think it was an appropriate place for a girl. I had been on their radar because when we were taking driver's ed. I argued with the instructor to allow me to drive the sports car (all the male students were driving) instead I was told I would not pass the course unless I drove the station wagon, which was the only car being provided for the girls. After one semester of drafting it became clear that I was not happy and I was offered the opportunity to go to the Regional Occupation Center three hours per day for the last 18 months of school. I got a certificate of 787 hours Architectural Drafting & Design from the ROC. In the final year of school (1981) all of us girls were required to take the business machines class so we could learn to become proper secretaries. Our instructor started the class by telling us that most of us girls would have no chance to be anything but secretaries and that was all we would could ever expect to become. He wasn't joking. After I graduated I attempted to get a position with an architectural firm. I went to San Francisco to apply at several firms there, as well as in the East Bay. When I was searching I was told by two of the men I encountered that they did not hire women, and never would. I asked one of them if I could apply as a secretary, which was a position they were attempting to fill, he glared at me in disgust and said, "no." At that time we were in the middle of a recession and jobs were quite scarce. I attempted to go to Chabot Jr. college for two semesters but flunked out. I would not be allowed to return for five years. The pressure of a bad home life, and depression from not getting to do the job I trained for, took its toll. My sister and I were left to fend for ourselves soon after and we spent our twenties and part of our thirties living in poverty earning barely above minimum wage, unable to save enough money to leave Hayward. It is a strange defect of my personality that when told I can't do something I resist and try to do it even more. Over the intervening 15 years I managed to have several jobs in the drafting fields. Remarkably, in all that time I was never allowed to learn Autocad, even though I expressed a keen desire to learn the program. I was a shop draftsman doing soft, mechanical, and exploded view, shop drawings. I was a map arber for a short time. In 1989 I purchased my first Macintosh (used) and started my first part-time business as a technical illustrator (earning only half what the guy before me had earned). He had burned the company, and I paid the price. But I was doing work I had at least some training for, and it sure beat working in the mall for minimum wage. After the five years being banned from Chabot, I went back to school, and painfully, slowly, put together the makings of a college degree in still photography. I would have gone into Engineering but it was made clear to me, by a male instructor, that I would never be allowed into that boys club. Still, I have one of those brains. I can think visually and analytically at the same time. So photography seemed like an answer, an artistic outlet with the technical side I could enjoy. I just didn't realize how long it would take. The years waisted going to class at night. The decades living hand to mouth. I could not afford a car until I was 30 years old and by that time I had had 30 bouts of bronchitis often affecting my health and my job stability for entire years at a time. When I finally got the car, my illnesses decreased dramatically and that is when it became clear that I had an allergy to diesel exhaust. All those years walking to and from work and to and from school along truck routes destroyed my health and left me with permanent damage to my lungs. So there I was in 1995 and I got a job to be a patent illustrator. Finally, after months of unemployment and having to take work in other fields just to make ends meet it looked like I would have an actual career path to follow. The day I started there was just one hitch, my new boss wanted me to become the Office Manager to replace the one who had quit the day before. And at much lower pay, of course. I had been out of work for a while so I took the job. Have you ever had someone scream in your face so closely and so loudly that their breath pushed the hair away from your face. You guessed it, he was a screamer. A year and a half I internalized his abuse. I didn't want to be unemployed and had not built up enough savings to get a job elsewhere. I took it until I could take no more. And then I yelled back. We yelled at each other for another year. Other employees would tell me that they could hear us yelling half way down the block when they were out walking on their breaks, it was that loud. But it was good. I hated his abuse but he gave the room to be abusive back. He both hated the confrontation and couldn't help but instigate it. We were perfectly matched and I learned that I would never be somebodies chew toy again. Finally, two and half years in, I gave him the ultimatum that I wanted to become a patent illustrator, as he h...Expand for more