This is in response for ExCultmember,messygoop, and anyone interested in what it's like to work in the CK. ;)
I applied in person at the COB right after high school graduation and they hired me on the spot. I was very excited and told my parents when I got home that I would be working for "the celestial kingdom on Earth". (I figured no one ever got in arguments there!) My parents were inactive and they still supported me with the decision to work there.
We were a small group; 7 of us, including my boss. All the church historical documents came to our department and we sorted through them and alphabetized them into categories and got them ready to be stored on the colder eastern side of the 2nd floor. (kept at about 50 degrees). Our boss was friendly,and I don't remember a snarky comment ever coming from him to anyone. Minimum wage was paid ($2.10/hr)and tithing was never deducted from our checks and we weren't expected to pay tithing. You did have to be an "active member", though. Leonard J Arrington, Church Historian at the time, would come bustling in to talk with our boss behind closed doors. He was always friendly,with a ready smile for everyone. My boss's boss would get wind of these "visits", and a couple days later, he would come storming in and behind the closed door of my boss's office, he would be yelling at him,probably because Mr. Schmidt was afraid that my boss would share LJA's latest discoveries with us. We used to get everything in the mail from cookies from Ireland, to a surgeon's kit from the Civil War. Patriarchal blessings,minutes from church courts, and historical documents came to our department. Our boss decided one day that we should skip work, so he took us to the Granite Vaults. They are immense with a lot of microfiche and papers. We saw the death masks of Joseph and Hyrum Smith before they were ever put on display. Bruce R McConkie's son worked in our department and he was friendly and down to earth; he didn't have the fearsome reputation of his dad.

Tina Turner singing Creedence--

Left a good job in the city
Working for the church every night and day
And I never lost one minute of sleeping
Worrying 'bout the way that things might have been
Big cult keep on turning
Proud Prophet keep on burning
And we're rolling, rolling
Rolling in deception...



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2017 09:51PM by BYU Boner.

Good one

Thanks for your account, Valkyriequeen. It sounds like it was fascinating work. Heady stuff for a recent graduate!

Very interesting. Thank you.

So then, how many "pioneer journals" came in? You've probably read the posts wondering if any were deep-sixed because they had scandalous dirt on church leaders or historical embarrassments.

As soon as something came in that looked like a journal or old documents, they were taken to the cold (50 degree) area on our floor and I think that LJA read them. He looked like the cat who ate the canary when he would come in to talk to our boss. One day,I received a suspicious looking package from Belfast with no return address, (this was during the troubled times in Ireland in the 70's) and my boss had the bomb squad open it. It turned out to be the Irish cookies that the stake there had decided to mail to our department as a thank you for the work we did!

As a former full time employee for the church I enjoyed reading this. Thank you for posting. (I never worked in Utah. I worked for CES in the Pacific Northwest.)

It tells me that the "one twoo" church is just like any other organization. You have some really good eggs and some really bad apples, and everything in between.

Thank you again.