The Lost Joys of Temping

Back before glamorously rebranding as the Gig Economy, working for minimal pay with no benefits or security was called temping. Temp jobs were pretty easy to get as long as you would do anything, anywhere, at any time and for any length of time, for any sort of meager compensation. If you were unfortunate enough to have a family or other obligations, or not have reliable transportation, or not be highly skilled and/or grossly overqualified, or not possess an infinite tolerance for human folly, the (presumably) flesh-and-blood placement specialists at temp agencies wouldn’t bother hiring you for temp jobs because who needs the hassle of someone with a life or life problems?

I will say one thing for the Gig Economy: the algorithms and apps that drive it probably don’t care about how flexible overall a worker may be, as long as their time can be jammed into some slot, somewhere. No doubt they have their own biases, especially as they learn which workers will take anything versus those that have conflicts, plus mediocre star ratings from people who don’t get their dinner on time, but at least you’re not automatically tossed on the discard pile by the temp placement specialist who just gives the same job to the same dozen jerks with no lives.

As one of those dozen jerks I filled several seasons—summers between semesters and a few early career “gaps”—with temp agency servitude. A soft-handed college kid who owned a car, I was a dream candidate to hold down a desk, phone, and word processing appliance. Sometimes there was filing. Typically I was not asked to sweep floors or weld things. Though I would have.

The most depressing aspect of temping was also its main appeal: the complete interchangeability of both workers and workplaces. Yes, I was a drone like any other, and nobody cared if I was there or not. But I also didn’t care if I was there or not. If not this office, then some other office, with walls and lights and machines and people and odors no different from the others. Should one such place be swallowed by a pit of flames overnight, there were ten more just like it, waiting in the agency files and needing a worker who was just this side of a corpse to sit somewhere and twitch for a few hours.

The presence of an office temp was often symptomatic not of temporary need but of a deeper sickness—financial, personal, logistical, or spiritual darkness. None of the places I temped at were “healthy” in a workplace sense. At one construction company I spent most of my time preparing stacks of junk papers for the senile founder to mark up with sharpies—pages and pages of unintelligible scrawled insane nonsense that I threw away at the end of each day. “Make sure to give him all the colorful mail,” I was discreetly told.

At a weeklong gig in a warehouse I was there possibly just to watch a door or something, it was never clear. So after day two of staring at the door, I brought a book. Even though I had previously been asked to do nor performed not one single act of labor, physical or otherwise, seeing me read a book enraged the boss and I was immediately dismissed. The regular employees solemnly broke out a cooler of beers for my goodbye drinks in the parking lot, as if I was a beloved colleague departing after years of service. I had been there 2.5 days. I wonder if they confused me with the last guy, or last several guys.

Perhaps the darkest temping scenario involved a company that served as an intermediary between doctors and insurance companies, transferring payments from the latter to the former. But the local office was shutting down and all resources were retreating to the headquarters in Texas. When I showed up, the total remaining staff included a vice president, an office manager, me, and perhaps a hundred empty cubicles and offices. I was stashed in a break room, manning the one functioning phone, copier, and fax machine.

My principle purpose was to answer the phone and reassure angry doctors, from a script, that they would soon be paid (they would not be paid). Oh boy they were mad! But unfortunately I had no further information, there was no one to speak to, my manager was unavailable, and they were welcome to call back but there would never be any more information, ever.

The vice president would ask me to copy something every hour or so. The fax machine also got lots of calls, but it had long ago used up all its paper printing enraged demands for money, which accumulated in a large bin that I assumed would eventually be thrown away unread. Then we ran out of paper for the copy machine too. The fax machine had a red blinking light that indicated an internal memory where it had stored more incoming faxes, but that memory was now full, as explained by the label next to the blinking light.

The VP of Copies, as I had come to think of him, kept asking me to copy things, and I told him several times there was no paper. He started to get just as mad as the doctors he was stiffing out of their insurance money, first yelling at me, then yelling at the office manager about the lack of paper. He tried to get her to go buy paper but claimed he had no cash to give her, and she stoutly (and wisely) refused to pay for it herself and “expense it” per his suggestion. I hoped he would ask me to buy some paper, but he didn’t. Would it have been funnier to refuse, or to placidly agree? I’ll never know.

Late in the day the VP of Copies came tearing into my break room yelling that we had an important fax that came in overnight. The three of us sifted through the fax bin, but it became clear that the fax machine had last been able to print several days ago. Anything it might have received was in its memory.

We found some used paper and loaded it into the fax, thinking we could at least print stuff on the blank sides so the VP of Copies could read his important message. However the fax was old and arcane, and while me and the office manager were puzzling how to make it start printing its queue, the VP became impatient and growled we just needed to “reset” the machine, so he unplugged it, then plugged it back in.

Me and the office manager cringed. Sure enough, the fax came back on and beeped itself ready to go! The memory light, formerly red and blinking, was now a peaceful steady green. Empty. Its little fax brain was wiped, the important message gone with the rest.

I stepped back as the office manager haltingly explained what happened. The VP of Copies listened, his face purpling, then seized the fax machine in both hands, lifted it above his head, and dashed it to the floor with all his strength, where it shattered into a spectacular spray of components. The office manager fled through one door and I did the same through another, and I jogged all the way to the parking lot, got in my car and drove home, where I called the temp agency and explained what had transpired. I concluded by saying I didn’t want to go back there, and the placement specialist agreed and set me up with another office, starting 8:30am the next day.