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Chicomm Blog

Meet Mary, The "Mother of the Office"

Posted by Jill McNamara on Friday, December 9, 2011

ChiComm Employee Spotlight: Mary Smerz

     If our company was a family (which some already like to think of it as) then Mary would be the Mother of the office. When people need something they come to Mary for help and it's been that way for the majority of her 34 years with Chicago Communications. When she started at the Schiller park shop she was only hired to come in and help for a couple hours a day. But as time went on, Mary's role began to grow and she got involved in more parts of the business.

     Born and raised in the city of Chicago, Mary attended Senn High School. Right after graduation she started working downtown for Continental Insurance Company. She was married a year later and continued working for a few more years until she started having children. She left the insurance company and became a full-time mom to raise her 3 children. Eventually she started some part time administrative work for Triton College and once her kids were all old enough to be in school, she joined Chicago Communications in 1977. During this time Chicomm handled two way radios as always but pagers had become mainstream as well, especially in hospitals. Mary helped clean and refurbish the pagers and eventually pagerbecame responsible for the ordering, part purchasing, programming, renting and inventory of the pagers. In these days hospitals were a big part of the customer base along with business and sales executives.

     And then along came cellular, in a big way. By this time the business was expanding and the company moved into a bigger location in Franklin. Mary was working full time now and she began taking on billing, building maintenance and more purchasing responsibilities for Chicomm in addition to running credit checks. Keep in mind cellular phones were so expensive in the beginning, it was absolutely necessary to run credit checks on everyone interested in purchasing one, even Michael Jordan!

     In 1990 ChiComm branched off to work with Ameritech and slowly built prescence in 7 different locations. Around this time Mary became officially responsible for all the Accounts Payable duties which is what she's done for the past 15 years now. Why has she stayed at ChiComm all these years? "There's never been a day I woke up and didn't want to be here. The owners, both now and in the past, have always been very empathetic and caring people. They really get to know you beyond just your working relationship. It makes you want to work harder when you truly care about the people you work for."

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