third job

My third job was a couple of jobs I got through temp agencies the summer after my freshman year of college. I recall looking through the Yellow Pages, the real, genuine, heavy yellow bible, for agencies in the area.

I knew no better and wore a black skirt with black Chuck Taylors to my appointment with the first agency; at the end of the twenty-minute appointment, which I hadn't realized was an evaluation, a woman with palimpsestic forehead skin leaned toward me, exhaled latte breath, and said, "Here's just a little tip. Don't wear sneakers to an interview." I was genuinely befuddled, since sneakers to me meant foam padding, whereas there was nothing but rubber and canvas separating my feet from the pavement.

The second agency assigned me to a two-day job stuffing 1000 invitations into 1000 envelopes at the offices of some sort of corporation in Palo Alto. I was given a cubicle and a computer and an envelope moistener and told to get to work. In order to make the work last 16 hours, I calculated that I had to stuff at a rate of 62.5 envelopes/hour, or about one per minute, so I stuffed one, set it aside, and read sonnets and short stories so as not to let my mind soften until it was time to stuff another, approximately one minute later. At the end of the first day, I discovered an extremely well-stocked refrigerator, and slipped two local beers into my bag before driving home. An hour later, I got a call from the temp agency. "Somebody saw you take two beers from the fridge," a woman said. "That's very unprofessional. Those beers are for clients." As an afterthought, she said, "And by the way, that's illegal." I never got a chance to ask her whether it was illegal because I was stealing or because I was not of drinking age, because that temp agency never called me again. Funny thing, I was straight edge then, and I had only taken the beers because my dad had expressed an interest in microbrews earlier in the week. The two beers remained undrunk in the fridge for two years, next to a box of Wheaties, until I threw them away.

A third agency required me to take an office proficiency test before sending me into the field. I want to say that this test involved a high-heeled administratrix upending a box of jumbo clips on a hard-coil carpet and timing how long it took me to pick them all up using pencils of different lengths like chopsticks, but the reality was less spectacular, and I merely typed nonsense paragraphs as quickly as I could to demonstrate my literacy, my toolbar navigating, my WPM. This led to a job scooping lemonade slushees at the Shoreline Amphitheater stop of the 1999 Vans Warped Tour. I started at 9 a.m. and worked until 8 p.m., at which time potential patrons were too sunburnt to move from the sloping grass hill to the lemonade stand, lest they snap their cracklins and disintegrate in the wind. The slurry we scooped was cold and sticky and impossible to control, and sales volume was the bottom line, so when the occasional penny or dollar bill dropped into the vat, one could only fish it out with one's fingers and deliver the change and the slushee to the dehydrated, sun-drugged, drug-drugged, fourteen year-old customer, who sucked his treat to Less Than Jake, Pennywise, Eminem. At 8 p.m., I was given a $5 coupon to redeem for dinner at the concession line.

Richard was also temping that summer, and he left a job at a software company a few weeks before the end of the summer. He recommended that I replace him, and because the software company loved him, I was chosen. Apparently he had been something of a superstar with the ladies of HR, cute and social and young and excellent at copy-making, even distributing sweets before he left ("And he wants to be a dentist!" the ladies cooed, "Is he trying to make us future clients?", guffaws), so everyone seemed disappointed that his broad-shouldered replacement preferred to hide in a cubicle, communicating with nobody besides her beloved acrylic tea cup, until the end of the work day. I got up earlier and earlier, arriving by bicycle at work around 7 a.m. some days so that I could leave by early afternoon. My job there was to transfer 3000 files from glossy red to matte red folders. As far as I could tell, the reason for the switch was purely cosmetic - Silicon Valley in the go-go '90s! Only a mix from J. (featuring, inter alia, Neil Young, Tim Buckley, and Soul Coughing) kept me from licking forks and sticking them into sockets. When I left the job, HR gave me an acrylic tea cup to take home with me, for a job well done.