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Everyone is a teacher. Everyone has something to teach me, and something to learn from me.

I remember expressing this sentiment in a rather confused way during my first full-time office job. A telephone repairman installed a new system in the office, and as he explained to me how it worked, I said something bookish or sophisticated. "You should be a teacher, " he said.

"I am a teacher," I replied.

He looked at me strangely.

"Aren't you a teacher right now too?" I asked.

And he laughed uneasily, said, "Yeah, I guess I am," and went back to his work.

That incident happened during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. Most details of those months remain hidden behind a haze of generalized anxiety — anxiety that culminated in September with a trip to the emergency room for what I thought was appendicitis but what turned out to be your garden-variety ruptured ovarian cyst. But that's another story.

One of the factors leading up to that ER episode was the seven weeks I spent working for Endata in the South End of Stamford, CT. The way I look at it, everyone should have a Job From Hell, from whence they can measure and appreciate all other employment experiences. I've had two or three. Endata was the one that sustained me through four years of scutwork in college.

Endata hired me through the Stamford High School Guidance Office. As the kindly gentleman who showed me around the plant explained, the company was trying to do its part to keep kids off the streets. I guess that's what the yuppies who commuted into our town thought Stamford High was all about: kids who needed to be kept off the streets before they went to dead-end jobs at places like Endata. They didn't know that their more wealthy counterparts, who lived in frickin' modern palaces up on North Stamford and commuted into Manhattan everyday, also sent their children to Stamford High School, often driving cars of a higher caliber than could be found in the teachers' parking lot.

So yeah, Stamford High had kids who needed to be kept off the streets, but they also had bratty little kids who needed to be flown to Vail every winter and went to Cancun on Spring Break.

I didn't need to be kept off the streets. I just needed to earn money for college. So I jumped at the chance to make a whole $6.50 a hour. And it was at Endata that I learned my first lessons about life in that borderless country known as Corporate America.

The branch manager's name was Ric Padeken, and he originally hailed from Hawaii. I'm speculating here, but I figure he must have made a pretty big political misstep to end up managing a crappy little office in a backwater town like Stamford, Connecticut. Rumor what it that at one time he was in charge of the company's entire West Coast operation.

As far as I could tell, Endata's sole purpose was to transfer corporate information from tape to microfiche. The production floor was clean, white, noisy, and always smelled faintly of ammonia. The managers and salesmen were white. The people who actually tended the machines were African-American and Latino. The branch manager was a raving lunatic of mixed Asian Pacific heritage.

I worked up front with Gloria, a fiercely beautiful Black woman who lived in the South End in one of those low-rise brick apartment buildings. She was kind, outspoken, efficient, and she loved to play with my hair. She taught me how to do my job using an effective mixture of patience and exasperation.

I looked up to her like the mentor she was, and learned my first lesson: Office Politics. It was clearly me and Gloria against the managers, especially Ric, who loved to storm through the branch yelling at the top of his lungs about this, that, and the other thing. Henry, the kindly older gentleman who had first hired me, was of questionable alliance. The workers on the production floor definitely belonged in our camp, but the stuffed suits in the back office who went out on sales calls certainly didn't. Especially the one who told me I'd better get used to doing secretarial work, since most women in the business world worked in "support services."

The people in our camp covered for one another. When Gloria called in sick after a July 4 party still hung over from the J she'd smoked, I reported to Ric with wide-eyed innocence how badly ill she was. When I cried with the stress of not knowing what to do and being yelled at by the boss, she held me briefly in her arms. And when a certain individual kept calling the company collect asking for Willard, a spindly guy on the production floor, she explained to me how important it was that we NOT accept the charges and protect him from losing his job.

I began to hate the place after about a week. At first, I was thrilled to actually have an office job, with a desk and a bank of telephones and papers to shuffle and put away. I even got to use an adding machine! Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about office etiquette, phone manner, or double-checking the accuracy of my work.

It can't have been easy for those poor people to break me in, but they did. They may have shamed me in the process, but they didn't fire me. Slowly I learned how to answer the phone, how to screen calls, how to tell people "no" politely, how to make sure that the column of numbers I added up actually matched the numbers on the stack of goldenrod copies from the production floor. I did all his, and in spite of it all, when the Big Corporate Office cut the budget, they still let me go.

Today I laugh at my naïveté, but at the time I actually thought that I'd been guaranteed employment at Endata for the duration of the summer. And when Gloria told me at the end of the day, "Starting tomorrow, we don't need you anymore," I really did march back to Ric's office and yell at him, then slam hard the precious fire door with its complicated lock that separated the production floor from the offices.

I left. And worked at Pizzeria Uno for the rest of the summer, stressed out by the unpredictable stream of people which ebbed and flowed and left me reeking of garlic and cheese at the end of the day.

That summer I learned the second and most important lesson one can learn about corporate America — and about the world of business in general. It's quite simple: these people are not your friends. A company is not your Daddy, and it's certainly not your Mommy. Labor is a commodity, and as its value rises and falls, a company may protect its assets more vigorously, but as soon as a commodity ceases to be profitable, it must be gotten rid of.

Those of us who rode the wave of the dot-com boom understand how easy it can be to forget this basic fact of business. We were all young turks who were going to change the world, one website at the time. Our work was changing the way people communicated with one another, the way they did business, the way they made money, even. People got rich off of air. And people lost their fortunes overnight.

Whatever you do, never forget this lesson: no matter how many perks you get, no matter how good your health insurance, no matter who you know or who you go to lunch with, the company you work for is not your friend. It never will be.