First of all, it was quite an honor. I was very young and had recently gotten out of the US Army and no US government agency wanted to hire me untiil after they'd seen that I'd qualified myself by getting hired at the UN first. Then the offers came but I rejected them because I was already at the UN. =)
Seriously, the vote of confidence I got from the premier international organization after learning German and Russian in the US armed forces was much better than the vote of zero confidence I got from US government agencies after having applied to them as well (they hadn't sent rejection letters; they just hadn't bothered to show interest).
The UN give a morning aptitude exam near the Manhattan compound to all those aspiring to work there. Rather than try to commute to midtown from my parents place in the suburbs (Rockland County), I arrived the day before the exam (which was given at least once a week) and stayed at a really cheap run-down hotel in Hell's Kitchen...before the rejuvenation of that area. I was determined to try to make it on my own and had refused to let my parents pay for a decent hotel. I still remember the dried blood on the hotel room walls that had been sprayed by heroin addicts; this signified the financial low point of my life in the moments before I took that UN exam.
I believe the results of the exam were immediate (my memory may have forgotten if there was an extra day's wait) and I went to the main recruiting office to formally present myself for a job with the test results in my hand.
Waiting for the job interview, I remember sitting with a recent American citizen graduate of John Hopkins who had majored in International Relations, undergrad or grad, I forget. As we talked, it was clear that he felt himself to be far more qualified than I was because he had such a low opinion of those who would serve in the US military. To him, it didn't matter that the Army had taught me Russian and German, fluently and that I'd served all over Europe and been all over the US and Hawaii. He assumed he was from a higher socio-economic class (even though I also had an undergraduate degree) and that he would get any job that was currently open.
He went into his interview first. When he came out 15 minutes later, he was ashen-faced and mortified. He had studied so many years at John Hopkins only to be told to go jump in the lake by the interviewer. He looked at me and said "Listen, if I couldn't get in, you might as well not even bother interviewing. There are no jobs available". Then he limped out as if his life were over.
That spooked me. When I heard my name called for my interview, I walked into the office, handed over my papers and said to the woman "I just heard from the John Hopkins grad that there are no jobs available, but I want you to know that, with my languages and military background, I'm highlly qualified to be a guard at the gates and will gladly accept $2K per month to be one."
She looked at me and laughed. She said "You mean that arrogant little fool that thought he was God's gift to the UN?" Of course there are jobs open. We just tell people whom we don't like that there aren't any."
Then she said "You've got the highest aptitude score I've ever seen. Now you could work as one of our brave and honored guards but I was thinking you might like a choice position that just opened as the archives manager for the Security Council Division on the 35th Floor of the Secretariat [ which of course is the tall building that symbolizes the organization at the corner of 1st Avenue and 42nd Street]. Let me make a phone call. Hold on." She then made a call and spoke in French to a woman who said I should come right over to be interviewed. I went over to the Secretariat and took an elevator to the 35th floor. The interview there went extremely well and my about-to-be-new-boss made a quick call to the Russian deputy to the Undersecretary General of that department. He was busy and said he trusted her opinion of the new potential hire and so I was hired. In retrospect, if this man had interviewed me and understood I'd just served with the US Army, he'd probably have said no out of fear that I was a CIA plant, which in fact I was not. The CIA hadn't been competent enough to even keep an eye on people getting out of the Army with skills they might want to exploit.
As it happened, I got along extremely well with all my Russian colleagues at the UN and they were glad, in retrospect, that I'd been hired even though the initial reaction on the 35th floor to having an ex-US miltary colleague was that of shock and acute discomfort (because they basically ran the 35th floor). I made good friendships with them and with political appointees from some very interesting countries and every moment at the Secretariat was fascinating.
Work started at 09:00 and ended at 17:00 for almost everyone at the Secretariat. The food and company in the cafeteria was fantastic at lunch-time and the place was packed. The view was of the East River right outside the glass wall and I remember the big neon Pepsi sign on the building in Queens across the river. It was used when filming "The Highlander".
Even better food was to be had when a top official invited me to eat in the ambassadorial dining room on an upper floor. That was posh.
The main cafeteria was open until 19:00 but 99.9% of UN employees refused to not go home when the bell rang at 17:00. There was never anyone to eat with in the vast dark cafeteria in the evenings. I never understood this because the food was great and low-cost. Why not eat before going home after work?
When the book "The Satanic Verses" was under attack at the UN, I played a not-insignificant role by accident. Just about every ambassador who was asked by their home government to condemn the book, was not allowed to read it himself. They all knew that their speeches were going to appear "uninformed". But, through the grapevine, a number of them learned that I had bought the book for myself at lunchtime the day before in a store on Second Avenue and that I had read the entire book overnight. So I had a parade of ambassadors coming to my office one afternoon (one after another) where we stood behind the filing cabinets and I pointed out the passages that I believed were rather controversial. They composed their speeches around my opinion of what was shocking.
Ironically, while I'm really into free speech, I'm proud that I was able to contribute to an informed discussion of the matter. Those speeches were accurate as to what Salmon Rushdie had written.
I also got on television receiving letters from protestors outside the buiding.
Sometimes in the late afternoon I'd be invited to parties being hosted by various embassies. The most interesting of these was that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. While socializing, I witnessed an American who was obviously with the CIA who kept passing his business card to Iraqi embassy staff members. Following him was an eagle eyed Iraqi secret service member who made sure he re-collected every last card that had been given out. You could cut the tension with a knife there. I still had fun. I was there for the food.
I organized a big Christmas party that was canceled at the last second because of a plane crash. When UN employees are killed, everyone feels it. =(
By the way, the average UN secretariat employee was a woman from the Philippines because they were considered the least ideologically oriented and, thus, the most likely to be loyal to the UN itself.
Now here's the kicker: The biggest perquisite for working at the UN was that I got invited to black tie balls on Park Avenue by people who were not related to the UN but respected people like me who worked there, regardless of their politcal opinion on whether taxpayer money was being wasted there. I'd be the first to admit that there were a lot of slackers sleeping on the job at the Secretariat. It still carried a ton of cachet to have a job there. The party invitations never stopped.
If my goal was to marry an heiress and be rich without having to work the rest of my life, I could have easily pulled that off in the year I was at the UN, because of all the cocktail parties and black tie parties. I could have quit the UN to be a Park Avenue house-husband or manage a wife's money.
But, one year later, I accepted a scholarship to take an MBA at the University of Toronto. I've been in business since then.
Part of the decision to leave the UN was that there was no real career path upwards because the top jobs, the boss spots such as ambassador or undersecretary, were all given by governments to political appointees assigned to the UN. If I want to be the US Ambassador to the UN, I will have to be personal friends with a future US President (which is entirely possible despite my reluctance so far to publicly discuss any political views in writing).
