Working at Votary Consumer Research

Votary Research did public opinion polling and marketing research. Their main project was a yearly report on the habits of people who watched television or listened to radio. They published an incredibly detailed annual book which not only listed how many people listened to or watched what when, it also listed information about their buying habits. It listed how many soft drinks they drank per week and which ones, how many plane flights they took each year, what clothes they wore, what kind of car they drove. Votary published a different book for each major city which they sold to advertising agencies. The information was kept secret until the books were published, which meant doing the production of the book in-house.

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Although publishing this yearly book was their main project, they did smaller projects for individual businesses. I worked on a project where they were determining whether Texas cities needed a new kind of car wash. All the polling was done by telephone, and was contracted out to other companies that made the telephone calls. The callers filled out questionnaires which Votary had prepared, and then they would be sent back to Votary's office where I worked in Santa Fe. Then the editors as they were called, would take the completed forms and put the answers on computer cards, with dots made with #2 pencils. The next step was to put the cards through the card reader, and that was where I came in. I would get a stack of cards from the editing room and put them through the card reader. The card reader would chug along, putting the information on the cards on a computer disk. If a card was unreadable, the card reader would spit it out and I would have to change the marks so the card went through.

The next step in the process was to send the data over telephone lines to Chicago. They sent the data late at night to save on telephone charges. Although it was all done automatically, someone still had to be there while the computers were doing their thing, and sometimes I would stay and do the late-night computer room shift. Keep in mind this was years before personal computers or home modems. The hard drives (five of them) were kept on a rack in a corner, and each was about three feet wide. There was nothing I could do if something went wrong with the transmission, but nothing ever went wrong with the transmission. It was peaceful and quiet and non-stressful to be the only one in the office late at night. I would order pizza and read magazines and call friends on the telephone. In the morning I would watch the sun rise over Santa Fe and go home when people started to arrive at the beginning of normal work hours.

It was a clean, straightforward job. I felt privileged to work in the computer room. It was a major step above being an editor, making little pencil marks on computer cards. It was a non-retail, non-food service job. It bordered on being a real job. Often I was the only person in the computer room, and I was trusted to do my job by myself, without a boss breathing down my neck. I liked Votary Research and the people there. Unfortunately, most of the work was done on the annual book they published, and when that work was done, everyone was laid off until the next ratings season. It was seasonal work, and eventually I was laid off like everyone else.