It may come as a shock, but once you graduate from university you will be required to start paying for things yourself. Of course those exempt from this annoyance are the offspring of financially successful families and students in graduate school. Being neither rich nor academic, I was forced to get a job. I enjoy my part-time job at Book City, but it doesn’t bring in enough dough to pay the rent. Being lazy and not confident in my own abilities, I recently became a temp.
I found a company online and applied to a few postings. Two days later they called me to make an appointment to take a skills test. I showed up at the agency’s offices located above a hair salon in Yorkville. I completed a spelling, typing, and Excel test (man, my pie chart was pristine) and then chatted with a woman named Felicia about the job I would be looking for. “An office job,” I said. “I think I’d be good in an office environment.”
“You seem shy,” she said. “Are you shy?”
“No, I don’t think I’m shy . . . Maybe it’s just that you have to get to know me before I open up.”
“I hope it’s not the interview. I hate it when people tense up because of the interview.”
“I don’t mind being interviewed. Honestly, my friends would not describe me as a shy person.”
“How would your friends describe you?” I blanked. There was a long silence.
“ . . . A nice guy, I guess.”
“Okay . . . Well, Keith, we’ll be in touch, and hopefully we’ll find you something.”
Two days later I accepted a position at a truck insurance company in the financial district. The office was on the fourteenth floor of a nondescript building. I was a claims administrator, which basically meant I was a glorified secretary. I delivered mail, sorted faxes, and filed, filed, filed. Required to deliver faxes to cubicles at least six or seven times a day, I got a pretty good feel for the environment in no time.
Most employees were bored and desperate for conversation, especially in the afternoon. Talk came in starts and spurts, inquiries about kids’ soccer games and cross-border shopping, whispers of scandalous loss claims. People wanted to distract themselves. While productivity requirements forced workers to push paper most of the time, the office was eerily quiet except for my periodic awkward chime of “Hello, I have a fax for you.”
The office was constantly monitored like Bentham’s Panopticon. The advent of the cubicle has created a privacy-free space, as anything above a whisper can be heard, the office walls so short that a supervisor can poke their head over and spy you shopping for Hello Kitty merchandise online. Not that this stopped anyone from procrastinating. Many times I dropped off mail to people playing “guess the TV sitcom character” or reviewing the Leafs highlights. But paranoia ran rampant. A lack of privacy combined with little job security for most employees (it seemed that no one had been with the company for more than three years) led to a high level of anxiety carried on the shoulders of claims adjustors. No wonder Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club was so stressed out.
Ultimately I was fired before my two-month term was up. Perhaps because I was a young male in a cubicle full of three gossipy women that everyone referred to as “the girls.” The day before I was fired, I saw Paula, the 35-year-old, 270-pound woman who still lived with her parents, complaining to my supervisor in the conference room. The die was cast.
The next day I came in, put down my bag, and opened my e-mail.
Just to let everyone know, Keith has been replaced with a new temp.
Wow, I thought, what cowardly assholes.
My supervisor was surprised to see me. She ushered me into the conference room. “Oh, I’m really sorry. The temp agency was supposed to let you know last night.”
“Well they didn’t.”
The official reason was that I was too slow on the uptake. I had been ten minutes late in the morning twice, and that I was “socializing too much.”
“With who?” I enquired, shocked. Did Bill, the kind old man who asked me how I was liking the job, rat on me for talking to him about soccer for too long? “I don’t know,” she said, “that’s just what my supervisors said.”
“Okay, fine. Whatever. Can you just sign my pay stub please,” I held out the form I had prepared with my working hours the moment I read the e-mail.
“Sure. Of course.”
As I was leaving, I looked over the cubicles and saw a new, young, short, blonde, fresh-faced girl standing by the fax machine. In my mind I wished her luck.
