Tuesday, December 06, 2005

 

ENTRY 200: TEMPORARY


I've been temping at a large and boring consulting firm. The assignment is just for a couple of weeks while an administrative assistant is on vacation, and the money is good, and I need it right now.


My temp agencies have been so lackluster that I haven't had a real sense of temping until now. I'd only done the odd one-day job here and there, things like stuffing envelopes in basement mailrooms and playing receptionist.


On the first day I was escorted to my place by the personnel coordinator. We walked down a hallway lined with six strange desk cubes--well, really two-sided work stations with a front and a right side. It was unlike any of the publishing companies I've ever worked in.


I was not particularly excited to be there, but I smiled brightly and extended my hand when the coordinator introduced me to everyone. One of the females looked at me and said, "What are you doing here?"


The coordinator explained I was a temp, and everyone said "Oh" and went back to whatever they'd been doing. We continued down the row to the work station where I'd be sitting. I met the woman I'd be filling in for, and she was nice enough, and spent a little time telling me the essential details. Mostly, though, I was left to read the Times online at a vacant computer. I felt uneasy for being on display, and for having nothing really to do, and for being surrounded by whispered conversations to which I was clearly not meant to be privy.


But when I came in the following Monday, there was plenty to do. It is all fairly mindless stuff, of course, and my only real responsibilities are to answer phones, keep up with email, arrange travel, and maintain Outlook schedules for three executives--two of whom I have still not met.


I was a bit nervous about Outlook, since I've always lied to temp agencies that I know it backward and forward. I mean, I've certainly used it for email at my other jobs, but I never bothered with the stupid scheduling part of it. Hamlet kept a paper calendar, and so did I. I've always hated the thought of being one of those weirdos sitting at a bar or in the subway and dabbing at a PDA. Paper may rumple or burn, but it doesn't malfunction or, typically, get stolen.


But, as I have always suspected, Outlook isn't hard to figure out. I'm a pro at it by now, which, trust me, is not bragging.


So, that hurdle cleared, I've just been doing my time as the new kid in the schoolyard. That metaphor is really quite apt when you're a new employee who's already given two weeks' notice. The majority of my rowmates (someone used this word, without irony, in an email; you can't make this shit up) blithely ignore me, but the woman next to me had promised the assistant I'm filling in for that if I had any problems I could ask her for help.


Still, it has all been very impersonal, and it's an especially awkward time of year to be a temp when the firm throws a huge holiday party and it's all the buzz around the office and there's no way in hell you're invited. Not that I like corporate parties, anyway. As I explained to a fellow temp, I was always uncomfortable with the idea of having to hobnob with these higher-ups (highers-up?) who consider you beneath their fucking notice 364 days of the year. Do I want to let my guard down and actually drink around them? Hell no.


So I have spent my idle time (when I'm not explaining to a caller that So-and-So is in Singapore until Thursday, or that the teleconference that was originally scheduled for Tuesday but later moved to Thursday is now on Tuesday again but at a different time, and may, in fact, be moved to Wednesday) reading the Times (but not my email, since aol.com seems to be blocked on their server) and making a list of the office lingo that particularly amuses me. Here it is, in no particular order.


1) The woman I'm filling in for left me an "Administrative Assistant Coverage Document." It appears to be a printout of an actual PowerPoint presentation.


2) "up-stream levers"


3) "behavioral finance"


4) the truly ubiquitous "benchmark"


5) "incent" used as a verb


6) "office footprint rationalization"


Often group emails use the opening address "Team." I was not furnished with pompoms, but I have the feeling I would not be dissuaded by management if I waved some. Not that they would notice in the first place.


And so I delete flurries of meaningless group emails written in Consultantese, feeling like I'm shoveling the Information Superhighway during a blizzard. I make first-class airplane reservations, and book rooms at the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons, and arrange limo pickups, and set up teleconferences only to reschedule them. And there is a certain ephemeral little symphony that sometimes arises out of all this administrative orchestration, a sort of conductor's satisfaction in combining half-a-dozen consultants' atonal schedules into one harmonious number-crunching chorus.


I have always wondered how people can bear to work at these non-creative administrative jobs for years on end, and I still do. But there have also been glimpses of insight, of a certain unpondering satisfaction as hours fly by in the methodical preoccupations of the secretarial waltz. I hear the buzz of Long Island girl-talk around me and sometimes it is somewhat amusing, if I bother to actually listen.


And they tolerate the temp well enough, never thinking that perhaps there are nights he lies in bed sobbing without knowing quite why. But, you know, it's really not so bad. Everyone has to muddle through. And almost everyone somehow does.


The woman who sits next to me, whom I've heard chatting with her husband on the phone about this or that, asked me today if I'd temped here before. I said no, and she told me that I was pretty good at all this, given how confusing some of the protocols are. I was strangely touched by this, having felt so stupidly tentative and clumsy in the beginning, fumbling with transferred calls and getting names correct.


I asked her what she'd done before. She'd spent well over a decade at this company, she told me, and I was duly impressed. Before here, she'd worked for a real estate agent, and before that, she'd been a dominatrix.


She stated that latter fact very nonchalantly, this married secretary in her late 30s, and after a few minutes I had to ask her, "I'm sorry, but did you say 'dominatrix'?" Maybe she had said, like, "aviatrix."


She had said "dominatrix," and she described how she'd worked at it a couple of days a week while she was collecting unemployment back in the early '90s. On a closet shelf at home she still had her leather implements.


I didn't ask her if she'd liked doing it, or about any of the dirty details. I wasn't squeamish about it, God knows, but somehow I didn't need to know. People do what they do, and, for some of us, answering switchboards and arranging luxurious accommodations for rich businesspeople and sitting in a little cube for hours on end feels as dirty as whipping a whimpering gentleman's flabby white ass with a riding crop.


I wondered if she'd ever gone home on the Long Island Rail Road after a long day at the S&M parlor, curled up on her mattress, and cried herself to sleep. I wondered if tunnels ever ended, and where employees ended and people began, and what it felt like not to drift for once.


But then her phone rang, and my phone rang, and I was reminded of what I was required to be. For now.

10:38 PM

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