Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

1. The Arrival

At any Romanian gathering, the most frequent conversation starter is, “How did you get here?” The answers range from the wise guy’s “This is just where the plane landed,” to sprawling, cinematic epics involving swimming across the Danube, gunfire, and prison cells. Whenever I try to tell our story – that we actually came here legally – the mood invariably shifts. We are immediately branded as dull and uninspiring and told to pipe down. For a long time, I obliged. I listened to everyone else’s harrowing tales and adventures, pretended to believe them, and kept my own story to myself.

And yet, for the same reason I write on my blog, I want to record those first few months so that I just don’t forget.

So, let’s jump back to the end of January, 1997, when we touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport. Just as our parents used to dress up for a visit to the U.S., I was “dressed to impress.” We approached the immigration office clutching our sealed envelopes from the U.S. Embassy in Romania, all ready for the hours-long gauntlet of waiting and interviews. The room was small and stifling, and my “impressive” attire soon turned into a personal sauna. The interview itself was longer and more grueling than the one at the Consulate where we had secured our visas. At the Consulate the officer spoke Romanian. Here, the officer spoke bored English, with her mouth closed. But four hours later, we were processed, photographed, and finally embraced our passports, each bearing the stamp of a temporary green card. Cosmin, always a trooper, played nice and, although he was bored out of his mind, he was ready for a new adventure.

“Welcome to the United States! Next in line!”

2. The New Neighborhood

I have told these stories before in old letters to my parents and friends, so I won’t repeat every play-by-play. Yet, some memories are etched so deeply into my mind that I feel compelled to write them down once more, if only to make sure they stick.

These are not in any special order, nor are they particularly earth-shattering or philosophical. It was the scent of Indian food, the spices, the fresh ingredients that greeted me as I stepped off the train and accompanied me all the way home. It was the overwhelming mix of perfumes, and incense wafting from every store.

Then there were the tomatoes: perfectly ellipsoidal, identically colored, and devoid of a single blemish. They were priced at 39 cents, yet they were so tasteless it seemed as though they had been 3D-printed. In fact, all the produce seemed alien. There were fruits and vegetables I couldn’t even identify. In any event, I remember promising myself that even if it were the last piece of food on Earth, I would never buy those tomatoes again.

Coming from Romania, where food is renowned for being both tasty and wholesome, the transition was a culinary shock. I had heard rumors about the lack of flavor in American food and was mentally prepared for it, but experiencing it firsthand was entirely different. The spongy, cheap white bread (packed with ingredients that were banned elsewhere, and impossible to pronounce) never ceased to amaze me. Schlitz beer, the “immigrant beer,” was cheap and bad-tasting, but it did its job; years later, it was enthusiastically replaced by Heineken. The sheer quantities of food sold (and consumed) by my fellow Americans were humbling. They still are. Unfortunately, I was a part of it.

Then there was the return policy: “30 days, no questions asked.” Bam! It was mind-blowing. Twenty-nine years later, I find myself thinking, and asking, “What? Only 30 days?”

I remember the stores filled with “Made in China” goods, cheap, abysmal quality, yet somehow eye-catching. We’d see rows of cheap, foul-smelling knockoff perfumes and makeup kits with names just close enough to be confused with the originals, perfect for “gifts,” as we used to say. I saw those massive suitcases, what I came to call “immigrant luggage,” back in the good old days when we were allowed two 70-pound bags. A Romanian at the airport always looked like he was moving his entire life across the ocean.

The streets – on the grid – to find an address you only had to be graduated from first grade. OK, second, if you were a bit slow. The streets and the avenues are numbered. If one street has an actual name there is massive confusion.

Everything was oversized. The apartment, spacious and heated so intensely that we had to keep the windows open in the middle of winter, was a surprise. The elevators were three times larger than the ones back home (not necessarily a bad thing). And the laundry room, with its massive coin-operated machines shared by the whole building, felt like something straight out of a movie, where neighbors would actually stop to chat.

In 1997, the corner grocery store had bottle returning machines. Insert the bottle, get 5 cents back. Two years ago, the system was implemented in Romania, and an American traveler was so impressed that he had to post about it on tik-tok. He had probably never ventured into a corner store in his own country.

But the thing that truly blew my mind was the political climate. Every time I turned on the TV, every station was obsessing over the same question: Did President Clinton have a sexual relationship with that woman? I remember thinking, “If this is what America talks about 24/7, then everything else must be just fine in this country.”

3. Job Searching

I didn’t realize it at the time, but we had access to two of the most important things a fresh immigrant could have: a fax machine and a refrigerator. A personal computer and a printer were just a bonus.

A reminder: it was 1997. Fax machines, AOL, Dial-up internet, tower PCs the size of small refrigerators, brick-sized cell phones, and dot-matrix printers were all flashing their lights and rattling away like machine guns.

Jobs were advertised in newspapers. Resumes, not curriculum vitae (even though they were essentially the same thing), and applications stacked on top of applications. TOEFL exams.

One hundred and ninety-eight resumes sent.

I remember the typing tests — speed and accuracy. I failed every one of them, at least the speed part. The person in the next seat was hitting 100 words per minute; I was hitting maybe 20. I was a computer wizard, but that counted for nothing. The person next to me got the job. My American experience? Zero. The fact that I had been a computer professor held no weight. There was immense family pressure to get a job, any job, even at McDonald’s. My frustration grew by the day.

Good Friday, 1997.

With financial institutions closed, I spent the day wandering aimlessly through Manhattan, walking up and down avenues, learning the City and learning about the City. Around four in the afternoon, the brick in my pocket started vibrating.

An interview.

Some company. Some address. Some guy on the other end of the line was speaking English. I understood maybe half of what he said, but somehow I managed to find both him and the place.

The gentleman’s name was Stephen-something, ending in “-witz,” which probably explains why he was working on Good Friday.

“You’re too new to this country to know how to lie on your resume,” he said, glancing at the pages in front of him. “I’m going to assume everything you wrote here is true. Would you be willing to take a test right now?”
“Sure,” I replied, barely stopping myself from adding, “as long as it’s not a typing test.”

He sat me in front of a computer, gave me the test, and explained the instructions.

Forty-five minutes later, I was done.

He looked surprised.

“That was supposed to take two hours.”

He reviewed my answers and found one mistake. What followed was an ad-hoc training session during which I showed him three different ways to solve that particular problem, including the one they considered “correct”.

By the end of it, he was genuinely impressed.

We parted ways with nothing more than a vague promise of a job. The (in)famous “We’ll call you back.” It was Friday evening.

On Sunday afternoon, he called. “Be at Merrill Lynch Monday morning at eight. You start then.” We talked for a few more minutes, and before hanging up he laughed. “You have no idea what Merrill Lynch is, do you?”

He was right.

I hadn’t the faintest clue what it was and where it was.

4. Merrill Lynch

I would like to say that the rest is history, but not quite yet.

Monday at 8:00 a.m. I started. Friday at 8:00 a.m. I was fired. By 8:30 a.m. I was rehired.

In his enthusiasm, Stephen had forgotten to tell me about consistency and templates. Charts were supposed to use the same colors. Page layouts were supposed to look identical. Fonts were supposed to match. What came out of my hands was 100% correct, but looked like a Christmas tree. The client thought I was making fun of him and took it personally. I had no idea any of this mattered.

Which is exactly what I told to the big boss while she was busy explaining, at considerable volume, why I no longer worked there. Apparently, my “nobody told me” defense and my bewildered face were convincing. Immediately I started a ML standards training.

During my time at Merrill Lynch, I believe I finally acquired some “American Experience,” although nobody ever managed to define what that actually meant. Regardless, nobody asked me about it again—the Merrill Lynch name on my resume was enough. By then, I had learned how a water cooler worked and how to operate a phone with a bajillion buttons. I learned “New York English,” or at least a version of it that people were willing to accept. I learned the corporate world. Most importantly, I learned to ask when I didn’t know something, even for the simplest tasks.

I had been advised by well-meaning people to keep my mouth shut, not talk to anybody, get in, do my job, and get out. “Nobody cares about you or your life.” Well, it didn’t work like that in real life. The person to my right was struggling with some charts; I looked around and realized Excel and PowerPoint were new to the whole team. I started helping them. My mouth stayed shut, I just took over their stations.

One day after another, I helped, until a lady named Alicia (may God give her a long and healthy life) stood up, closed the door to the room, looked at me, and said, “What’s the deal with you? You know more than all of us put together, yet you don’t say a word?”

I told her my story, such as it was. When I finished, she addressed the whole room: “For three months, we’ll talk slowly with Stefan, and we’ll answer all his questions about American life.” Then, she turned toward me. “And you? After three months, you’re on your own. The training wheels come off.”

It turned out that, while I was learning about America, I had something valuable to teach them in return.

And, after surviving my first-week firing, I earned the nickname Captain Consistency.

The following year, I was writing the training manual and tips & tricks in Excel.

Now, I can finally say: the rest is history.