Ruth Riley:  

t for the "ABC" men. I also remember dragging myself to my 8:00 am philosophy class which was in a large, stone, very cold lecture hall. I would crawl out of bed, throw on a trench coat over my nightgown, walk down the path to the lecture hall, find a seat in the back of the room up against the wall and lean my head against it for an hour. Obviously, I had to leave the trench coat buttoned up with belt fastened throughout the whole hour! (I got an A in the class. Lord knows how.) I loved being in college and was not very happy about facing the "real world" when graduation was approaching, but it all turned out all right after all. Workplace During the summers in between college years, I worked at Hewlett-Packard in Hibernia. My job was to sit on a sort of assembly-line and solder together components for the space-shuttle. I remember thinking how crazy it was that the astronauts' safety depended on someone as inept as me to do this correctly. Fortunately, they did have a pretty good quality control program. This was a great summer job. And it paid a whole $2.00 an hour. I thought I was rich! As soon as I graduated, I accepted an offer from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of NJ where I was a "Contract Analyst". I wrote contracts and did a lot of proof reading and editing, so my English major was very useful. When I moved to PA, I was able to get a job at the PA Blue Cross plan in a similar capacity, and then when I moved back to NJ in 1980, I went back to NJ Blue Cross. I left Blue Cross in 1990 to take a job with an independent employee benefits consulting firm and that's where I stayed.