Le Temping Perdu

Apologies for the break.
In the last few weeks I have resigned from the permanent well-paid part time position with the private law firm and have thrown myself back into the chaotic world of temping. This is mainly due to life circumstances and the need to fit a crappy day job around them but I'd be lying if I denied that a little part of it was fuelled by the desire to have more entertaining stories to write about. In my previous job, things had become bearable and there wasn't a whole lot left to whinge about. In my new role, well, I just don't know where to start. I could being with relating how I am being taught the alphabet vis a vis filing but I choose to start even further back and relay my brief foray into the wonderful world of Temp Agencies.
(Thanks to my old fim for the $60 bottle of wine as a leaving gift. Far better than a $30 Accessorize voucher as is the fate of some secretaries I know. I guess it helped that my department co-ordinator was a fellow alcoholic. Cork in hand, I salute you.)
And now, let's talk about Julia Ross.
Two weeks before I quit the old job, I duly sent out the usual batch of resumes and cover letters to the usual gaggle of temp agencies and was inundated with calls from women at said agencies, all of whose names ended in the letter 'a'. I duly made appointments for the round of interviews and sailed through most of them, all the while sticking to my preferred role as a contract worker instead of considering permanent roles which were constantly shoved in my face by agency hacks looking to make a big fat commission.
For anyone who's ever been a temp, you know the drill. You walk into the agency, you fill out the form, you take the spelling test and you have the nice 10 minute chat with the Agency Rep who Sources Employment (ARSE). Once you have finished with ARSE, you are then taken to a windowless room (always) and sat in front of a computer to do a Word, Excel and Typing test. You then wait for another 5 minutes for ARSE to re-enter and say 'that was quick!'. No matter how long you take, they will always say 'that was quick!' on completion of these inane tests. Likewise they will always get excited over the fact you can spell words like 'committee' and 'government' even though your work history shows employment in top tier firms where those words are required to be spelled on a daily basis. I tell you what, if you ever have any self-esteem issues, go and register with a temp agency. They will make you feel smart just by being able to write your own name.
You then leave and usually in the next 24 hours you get a call from the ARSE offering you a wildly inappropriate and underpaid position and one which you were not looking for in the first place. One agency I applied with for legal secretary work called to offer me a position as a medical filing clerk. Ignore the fear that if you say 'no' to the first role they will not offer you another one. You are their bread and butter. For once, they must kiss your arse and not the other way around. I learnt the hard way years ago after accepting the first position that was offered to me and ended up in a two week filing job at $9 an hour. Learn from my mistake.
I normally don't name and shame because despite stupidity and illogical processes, most people in firms and agencies are well-intentioned. However there are rare, stunning examples of complete dickheaded-ness which make me feel obliged to identify - not so much to castigate but to warn others.
Julia Ross….come on DOWN!!!!!
(Rant to be continued - I have just been given some filing and told that B comes before C)

Memories

For those who wonder in their idle moments whether their work emails really ARE being read by company hoods, let me regale you with a story from the vault.

In the heady brit-pop soaked days of the late 90s, I was living in London and temping. I was spending my days typing pointless documents and eating from Pret a Manger, spending my nights with mopey foppish flop-dangling English boys with names like Johnny and Andy and idly wondering how a brazen and artsy suburban mallrat had suddenly turned into a secondary character from a badly-written chick lit novel.

I was assigned, through sheer dumb luck, to a prestigious 8 week temping job – secretary of The Sun Sportsdesk. The Sun. Rupert Murdoch’s libellous scandal-mongering baby. Home of the Page Three girl and expose articles on David Beckham’s secret gay lover’s cousin. The paper that was the indignant aunt for the nation while simultaneously being the smutty uncle as well.

So one winter’s morn I arrived for my position as the temp secretary for The Sun Sportsdesk. Now, I don’t quite know how to put this but to say ‘I hate sport’ would be like saying that Israel is not really friends with Lebanon anymore. I am the antichrist of sport. I can’t stand it. I pretended to like it for about 6 months while I shagged a football fan but thank god we broke up and I could go back to drinking in bars that didn’t have Foxtel.

The Sun Sportsdesk is disturbingly like every stereotypical movie sportsdesk you’ve ever seen except with grumpier and more depressed journos. Think of a dozen Charles Bukowskis working in the newsroom of ‘Never Been Kissed’ and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of the dead-spirited atmosphere I walked into at 10am (ok, more like 10.20am) each morning. This job was a typical temp job as well. Typical in the sense that I was not introduced to anyone at all, that there was no handover sheet, no supervisor and no hint of a vague description of what I was meant to be doing. There was a computer and a phone and a desk. The rest I had to figure out for myself.

After about the 3rd day, I had some kind of routine. I would get in late, faff about for about an hour turning on the computer, reading the papers and making it look like I was doing some kind of obscure research, go down the hall to the po-faced bitchblonde secretary to ask her for the umpteenth time if she had a moment to help me and have her either completely ignore me or say ‘yes, I’ll come down later’, sit and play solitaire – vegas gambling style, then play minesweeper and beat my record of the previous day.

So, given the lack of work and lack of idle conversation, I did what any self-respecting temp would do – I sent hundreds of personal emails from the work computer. The main correspondence was between myself and an australian friend who was in Melbourne. And given that I had been completely and utterly ignored in the flesh, I was in no doubt that my emails would suffer the same fate and so I wrote about EVERYTHING. The topic of EVERYTHING included: what grumpy bastards the journos were, what I thought of the po-faced bitch secretary down the corridor, what I thought of the job, how much I wanted to shag the racing editor who sat opposite me, in-depth descriptions of my sex life, including the current shag who liked to say things like ‘can you feel my cock’ during the height of passion and how much it put me off, how bored I was every single day, how I hoped the g-string beneath my desk would dry in time for the date with Mr ‘Feelmycock’ that night, how much I drank on the weekend, how much I didn’t remember on the weeked…..shall I go on? I think you get the picture.

8 weeks later, my assignment ended.

2 weeks after that, my Melbourne-based friend received an email from the Sun Sportdesk. It read:

‘It has come to our attention that a number of emails were sent to this address from the temp secretary at this desk. While we would like to remind her that sending personal emails is in direct breach of company policy, we haven’t had such a laugh in ages and would like to know when she is coming back.’


Here endeth the lesson.