It's Hard Out Here For A Temp

I've been working as a temp. It isn't so bad, I suppose; I could be out of work, but it isn't great either.

In New York I temped in an office. I worked for a charity for a while last year, so the temp agency sent me to the Council on Accreditation, which is on Wall Street. The Council ("COA") set rules for adult daycare centers and adoption agencies and other humanitarian organizations. I read their documents to find words Canadians spell differently than Americans and then changed how these words were spelt. It was pretty boring, so I wrote myself a little MSWord macro that did the job for me. Then I looked at internet all day and emailed the documents to my boss at about the rate I figured it took the other people on the project to do the work by hand. I made fifteen dollars an hour for this.

I'm back in Virginia now, and I'm still working as a temp. Things work differently here, though. I got a sweet job in a box factory for one day. They paid eight dollars an hour. I basically folded up pre-adhesived boxes and stuck them together. Later I put cell phones in some of the boxes. It was real stimulating. The, uh, permanent employees were exactly the sort one would expect to meet in a box factory. The women typically looked like foxes or other forest animals. The men were pathetic, but there was an old black dude named Willy who was fairly funny-looking and an awesome "supervisor" named Patrick who tried to talk jive with the black employees with humorous results. They all got into a big argument about sweet potato pie, and I enjoyed hearing the boss alternately argue his opinion and sheepishly acknowledge the blacks' allegedly superior palate. He was fighting a war between his gelled-up bossman haircut and his pale "boner" jeans, which long to be accepted by black people but can't. Eventually he capitulated, but I got to enjoy the accent he affected for about twenty minutes. Everyone then got back to the serious business of complaining in low, weary voices about their dying aunts and health concerns. It was a depressing, stultifying environment.

After the box factory, I spent the week waiting for a call from Rachel, my job advisor, or temp helper, or something. Her company is called "Temporary Solutions", but this is only funny, apparently, to me (it makes me think about using a belt as a tourniquet.) Rachel found me work at Comcast, on Dale Boulevard. I took the job. Now I walk there from my house.

My job at Comcast is pretty grim. Here's how it works: When a cable guy ("technician" or "tech") is about to go to someone's house to fix the cable, or to install the cable, or whatever, he prints a work order with some information on it about the situation he needs to resolve. I don't know who puts the work orders together or assigns them. After the technician resolves the problem, he writes a few numbers on the work order and enters them into another computer, which I assume uploads them to some kind of database. I don't know what the numbers mean. Later, the cable guy drops his completed work orders in a little basket near my desk. I gather the completed work orders and check the numbers. I don't enter data. I don't interpret it, either. I make sure the numbers are the same. In virtually every case, they are. It's incredibly boring.

Comcast's computers count how many work orders are left for me to, uh, process for each day. When I arrive in the morning, I can check to see how many work orders remain from the day before, or the day before that, and so on. I never bring this count to zero. My work for the day typically lowers the number of unprocessed jobs from about six hundred to about three hundred. As one might easily imagine, this detracts from the small amount of satisfaction I might conceivable derive from this task.

I have a few more, less important, things to do at Comcast. These auxiliary tasks are less interesting and more labor-intensive than the routine described above, and all involve checking numbers on a list against numbers on a computer. I make ten dollars an hour for this. Soon, though, I'll take off and work somewhere else. My co-workers've been doing this shit for YEARS, with essentially NO distractions.

My bosses are pretty stingy with their bandwidth. The company makes extensive use of a net filter of some kind which prevents me from accessing the vast majority of websites I might otherwise use to help pass my time. I can't check my email. I can't access any forums or use eBay. I can't get most non-profit organizations, so it's difficult for me to see pictures of diseased children. I don't have access to any kind of "streaming media", so I can't watch the "Protect Ya Neck" video or listen to Launchcast. As nearly as I can tell, my entertainment options are limited to reading Wikipedia and Kunstler.com. Luckily, I have a clock radio.

I listen to B-101.5 ("the B") all day long. The little clock radio in my office apparently only picks up one station. I haven't bother to check because, you know, it's a radio—-it's not like I'm going to get the dope shit anyway. B-101.5 is a pretty difficult station, though; it comes out of Fredericksburg, so all the ads are for Honeybaked Ham and some kind of heating and cooling place with vaguely threatening implications for, uh, homeowners ("Write this number down… For when you need it.") But if "Tell it to my Heart" or Rick Astley is your thing, the B is a pretty good bet. I like the eighties retro lunch hour.

My coworkers are a musical bunch. Jarmel, a mincing black homosexual, likes to hum along with the All-American Rejects when "Move Along" plays on the B. Marie, with whom I am developing an especially close relationship, loves the Police. (We determined this to be a shared interest.) My primary boss, Denise, listens to subaudible soul music in her office while caterwauling along in a piercing, atonal soprano. It's enough to drive anyone crazy—and has: Jarmel locks his file cabinet (presumably to hide his pictures of Taye Diggs and Tyrese), Marie talks like a four-year-old, and Denise, like, makes those horrible noises. I have some consolation, though. The B routinely plays "Lips of an Angel" and Evanescence...