As job beginnings go, mine was inauspicious. Fresh from a five-week adjuster boot camp in Atlanta, I reported for duty on a Monday morning to my newly assigned claims office in Virginia.

I was eager and wet behind the ears. The branch office had no spare desks, though, so the claims manager showed me to my quarters …back in the "dead file" storage room. At the time, I was too green to mind. As adjusters wandered back to fetch supplies or retrieve closed files, they acted startled to see me on the phone, taking recorded statements, or reading manuals. Eventually, staff turnover reared its head, and I moved to a workstation in an office. Boy, was I moving up in the world!

Now I'm not throwing bricks at my career-starter alma mater, though. They were kind enough to hire a useless political science major. (Try swinging that in 2013.) Their practice was likely representative of the modus operandi at other claims offices at the time. In the late 1970s, when I entered claims, "onboarding" was not even a word, or perhaps much of a concept. New claims adjusters often got tossed into the deep end of the proverbial claims pool to either sink or swim. "Here's your desk and your caseload of more than 200 files from the last adjuster who quit. Good luck with that, and have a nice day."