Mrs. Toy got me the job at KLH because of my language handicap — initially as a laborer, unpacking and setting up record players. KLH made high-quality audio equipment and record players, and it was a real company with real production standards.

Growing up in Czechoslovakia, everyone believed that people in the USA worked very hard, that they were highly efficient, and that they were technically the best in the world. So I tried very hard at KLH and made sure my output was at least as good as anyone I worked alongside. After New Year’s, rumors started going around that many people would be laid off, since the company had pushed hard to produce as much as possible for the Christmas season and now the orders had slowed. At lunch one day my coworkers were discussing it among themselves, and I heard them saying that I was one of the reasons for the layoff — that I had produced too much and made everyone else look bad. They assumed I could not understand them because I did not speak much English. But I could understand more than I could speak, and I stood up and told them they were wrong and to stop talking about me like that. After that they were very nice to me.

My English was improving steadily, since I was living and working entirely among English-speaking people. I saw Pepa once a week or once every 2 weeks. I was always an avid reader and I decided that books were the fastest way through the language barrier, so I bought a simple adventure book and worked through it with a dictionary. The first book took me a month. The next one took 2 weeks. Gradually I started reading faster and faster.

I was also trying to figure out how to break into a job in my actual profession at KLH. I found a trade school for electronics technicians and went to talk to them, thinking I needed to learn the American technology. They gave me a test and told me I had nothing to learn there and would be wasting my money. So I got up my courage, went to my supervisor, and asked him directly for a technician position. They tested me and transferred me to a group that was troubleshooting and repairing rejects from the production line. It was a good job and my coworkers were very nice. Not long after that I started attending night classes at Lincoln College, which was attached to Northeastern University. I took technical subjects — mathematics, physics, electronics — basically the same classes I had already taken in Prague at Charles University in the electrical engineering program. Those classes also helped me learn English in a technical context, since I already knew the material and could focus on the language. At the same time I was dealing with the draft, which I described in a separate chapter.

After about a year at KLH, Honeywell was recruiting electronics technicians to work on their new minicomputers. They were offering better pay than KLH and I applied. I did well on their exam and got the job. My coworkers at KLH tried to discourage me, since analog theory was, in their view, more technologically advanced than the new binary systems these minicomputers used. They thought I was stepping down. I did not see it that way.

At Honeywell I had been hired as an electronics technician, though at some point they started calling the position engineering assistant. Before I started on the floor they put me through several weeks of intensive technical training on their minicomputer line. I finished second best in the class on the final exams. My work was final assembly and quality testing of their new minicomputers — mainly the CPU units and disk controllers. It was challenging work and I became very good at it, particularly at finding the root causes of failures. We rotated through 3 shifts, alternating every 2 weeks. Whenever someone could not figure out why something had failed, the job came to me, and I always found the cause and fixed it.

The relationships at Honeywell were not like they had been at KLH. It was competitive and less friendly. At one point a coworker told me directly that he resented immigrants like me coming to the country with engineering degrees and working for less money, taking jobs from people like him. He thought I was a fully qualified engineer. I was not — I simply had good logic and knew how to think through a problem. But I did not correct him.

Before I left, I went to my supervisor and asked for a raise. I felt I had earned it, since I was clearly more productive than others who had been there for several years. He told me something I have never forgotten. He said that in a large company, everyone thinks they are the best, and if management rewarded the one person who actually was the best, they would upset all the others. So they would rather lose the best person than upset the rest. I listened to this explanation and accepted it. When I was leaving Honeywell for MIT, I told my supervisor that when I came back I would be his boss. I could not help myself.