Temporary Hell

"This is for today," she said in a thick, unidentifiable and barelycomprehensible accent. Her nicotinestained fingers, raw and bleeding from being chewed continuously, dropped the pile of sweatdrenched papers onto my desk. "No rush." Welcome to hell. There was "no rush" for me to enter 20some forms into an arcane, textbased database program that substituted CtrlM for the Enter key. The government office I was temping at processed hundreds of pages of paper a day: zoning violations, building code permits and other similar documents. My data entry job only involved processing the forms listing illegally placed (and subsequently confiscated) garage sale signs. Twenty forms certainly weren't eight hours worth of work. But the county government agency didn't care if I swung from the fluorescent lights by my toenails for seven and a half hours, as long as I finished my work. I walked around the office, asking the jaded county employees for work. Occasionally, I'd be successful: These need to be filed. Can you copy this for me 42 times, doublesided? Can you crawl around on the floor and pick up those paperclips and threeholepunch droppings? My nail polish is drying. My attempts to find tasks to fill the time made little difference. A halfhour or so into every day, monotony and boredom crept up behind me, slowly, tapping me on the shoulder and then delivering a hatchet to my face that sunk deep into my skull, refusing to let go until exactly 5 p.m. Then, it would evaporate without leaving a wound. By May of my sophomore year, my savings account was threatening to dip below $100. Temping sounded alluring: move frequently from job to job, company to company. Photocopy here, staple there, cash a paycheck every week. Temp agencies salivate at the thought of khakiwearing 20yearolds with typing skills and lots of time. Trade your backwardfacing University of Wherever hat for a tie, and you're practically assured a summer's worth of work. It seems competent and willing people are in remarkably short supply; collegeaged temps fill the void nicely. Temping is little more than whoring without penetration, unless you count sharpening pencils. Your pimp, the temp agency, tells you where to go, how to dress and what to do. Then they take a sizeable cut of your pay, slap you around and send you to your next assignment. It's the price you pay for seeing "Mission Impossible:II" for $8 the Friday night it comes out rather than go a month later at the $1.50 theater; your punishment for too many dinners at Chili's and not enough in the cafeteria. Successful temping is a combination of refusing assignments that last longer than two weeks and learning how to amuse yourself as the clock taunts you. Locking yourself in a monthlong temp job is like plugging in a toaster, holding it tight and jumping into a pool, pretending you don't know what will happen. My worst assignment of the summer — two weeks and three days in the county permit office — was over rather quickly. Passing time, even with the fortune of actually having work to do, can be difficult. Count the pixels on the screen (are there really 800 across?) Take files out of drawers and refile them. Those hours of pure boredom provide plenty of anecdotes perfect for filling the time during that lame premovie trivia slide show. And not all assignments inspire you to stick a pencil into each nostril and slam your head into a desk, killing yourself like the subject of the urban myth. I worked as an administrative assistant — what the hell: secretary — replacing a woman who hadn't vacationed in years because her boss was so picky about temps. He, like others, didn't hide his shock when he saw I was a guy, and commented openly that he'd intentionally never hired a male secretary before. Despite having to take dictation by hand, this $9 an hour job wasn't as horrific as others. And it, like all others, ended. Eventually.