Temporary Insanity

This is the first of a couple of posts recalling my adventures in temping in San Francisco.


"Okay! Great! I really truly look forward to working with you, Mary!" Do you have any questions for me?"

Yes, Bill. I do. Is it your hair gel leaking into your brain that is making you this unnaturally chipper or are you honestly wetting yourself with glee at the prospect of finding me temporary office jobs?

"No, Bill. I think all my questions for you have been answered" I said, trying my best to out fake smile him. The rest of my questions were being directed at the universe. Why oh why, sweet sweet world, did I just spend $40,000 on a Masters degree when the job requirements currently set before me could be met with what I learned from watching Sesame Street?

For the next few weeks I told myself that it was best that the reams of resumes I had sent out were being met with silence. After all, I needed time to settle into my new life in California. I had left my friends, family and job prospects in Boston to get a fresh start in the Bay Area. Always enjoying a challenge, I decided that during these tough economic times it would be a good idea to move to the place where the job market sucked the hardest. Time passed and I slowly began to feel more comfortable with my new West Coast surroundings. I befriended the dogs I saw on my regular runs around the Berkeley Marina, I looked forward to jamming out to the smooth sounds of Lionel Ritchie as I scanned the aisles of my local Safeway, and my hair was adjusting quite nicely to Oakland's lack of humidity. However, as fantastic as all this was, funds were decreasing and financial stress was increasing. I needed work.

Finally, I got a call. An environmental agency in San Francisco needed someone with Filemaker Pro expertise to help redo their database. Another temp and I were to spend the next three weeks gracing Forests Forever with our databasing savvy. The next morning I stepped on the BART train with a sense of employed purpose, got off on Market Street, purchased a hazelnut coffee that put a spring in my step, and had twenty minutes to spare. At five to nine, I approached the building, passing an overweight middle-aged hippie, long stringy brown hair tied back in a ponytail, standing near the entrance, smoking. My hello was returned with a head nod and a quiet, "Hey." I ascended the dirty carpeted stairs in search of Suite 220 and tried to hold my breath so as to escape the smell of inexplicable crustiness that permeated the hallway. Just as I wondered what to do about the fact that Suite 220 was locked, the ponytailed smoker appeared with a key in hand. "Hey…you Mary?" I suddenly felt overdressed and overshowered.

"Sure am. You must be Doug." He was just the guy I was told to look for. My boss. Doug unlocked the door, which revealed a small dark, musty, cavernous room filled with ancient computers, boxes and enough paper to make Julia Butterfly scurry up a redwood and never come down. Since it was my first day I didn't feel it was my place to suggest to the folks at the environmental agency that they may what to consider recycling.

As we waited for the other temp to arrive, I sat down at a table in the middle of the room, pushed aside some crumbs and flipped through the Chronicle. Doug popped in a CD and asked, "Ya like classic rock?"

"Sure, I like all types of music" I said. This place may actually be fun, I thought. Days full of data entry and listening to music can’t be too bad.

"Well, you're gonna love this" Doug said. Music began to play and I was suddenly having flashbacks to 1978 when my older brother and his friends would have their awkward pre-teen band practice in my parents' basement.

"Wow" I said, feigning interest. "What is this?"

"The Toadstool Banditz of Gilgamesh. My band. We just cut this CD recently. Connie, who works here too…she'll be in tomorrow, is in TBG too. Wait…let me cut to the third song…it really rocks."

Were my ears deceiving me or did he just say "it really rocks”? I instantly felt like I was on a promo for a “Freedom Rock” album. Finally, Heather, my co-temp, entered the room. It was the first of many occasions in which Heather confirmed that I was a fairly sane woman in an insane world. Heather had a smirk on her face that seemed to say, "Wow, it's dark and smelly in here and there's crappy music playing. What the hell am I getting myself into?" But she chose the more socially appropriate, "Hi, I'm Heather, the temp."

The first day's work involved going through a pile of papers containing 70,000 names and crossing out any duplicates. The hours passed, names were crossed out, and Heather and I had already gotten passed the initial pleasantries and agreed that the priority for the next day was that we came prepared with our own music. As I sat and stared at the canary yellow pages in front of me, becoming secretly excited whenever I spotted a name in triplicate, I had a vision of my obituary. "Mary, age 28, death by classic rock. After being forced to listen to CCR for eight hours straight, Mary fell to the ground murmuring, "I'm rollin…rollin…rollin down the river."

Connie showed up at work the next day in a frenzy that I soon learned to depend on. There was a seemingly endless explanation of the chaos at home that caused her absence the day before followed by continual non-sensical chatter throughout the day. That day Heather and I began the work that we would continue to do all day, every day, for the next four months. The entirety of our job involved entering a member number into the database and updating a few of the fields. 70,000 times.

There were a few things that livened up the long boring days at Forests Forever, more commonly known as FoFo by everyone who worked there. One was Upstairs Mark. He was in his mid-forties and recovering fairly well from a few thousand too many acid trips back in the day. Mark did work on the database and came down about once a day to obsess on his evil stepmother and the ways in which the world was turning to crap. Most people were tired of hearing from Mark, but Heather and I enjoyed hearing his quirky philosophies. Another FoFo highlight was the sing-alongs. Aside from the occasional forced run through of the TBG CD, Heather and I had gained total control of the music. We varied it up with everything from hip hop to showtunes. But at 3 o’clock, the time when we always hit the wall, we threw in the upbeat sing-along songs, Prince and Madonna being our favorites. Soon Joe, the cleaning guy, joined right in. Yet another pick-me-up to the repetitive FoFo workload was the daily lunchtime walk. This was a time for Heather and I to window shop for things that we couldn't afford and people watch in the world's best area for people watching. Some highlights from our daily jaunts were the woman with the foot tall white wig with various notes and little items pinned to the back; the woman sitting on the curb and smiling at passerbys while not wearing any pants, and the woman singing to herself, "Fifteen chickens on a dead man's chest….wah-oo! And a big bag of corn!" That catchy tune became a staff favorite.

Heather and I cherished the zillions of smoke breaks Connie and Doug took. This was a time when we could accomplish important tasks like creating the set list for the band we made up called, "Connie's Banter." They'd play hits like "Should I Shut Down the Database", "We Should Really Start Up That D&D Game Again", and that catchy hit, "Who’s Cell Phone Is This…Should I Call One of the Numbers and Find Out or Should I Just Leave It and See If Someone Picks It Up." It was also during smoke breaks that we’d lay on the dirty carpeted floor and do various stretching routines.

One day, we got back from lunch and were greeted by Jennifer. Jennifer was a phone canvasser who would now be working a few hours a week in admin. She was very friendly and I was delighted to see a new face. It was not long before I had reoccurring visions of putting a muzzle on that face. Jennifer's ramblings made Connie seem eloquent. When I told Jenn that my background was in social work, she gave me a play by play of her experience working at a group home for kids, that ended in her bawling uncontrollably. Jennifer's entire job in the admin department consisted of taking care of the paper that needed to be shredded. By "taking care of" I mean sticking the paper in the shredder. It was taking her days to get through a box of paper. She occasionally interrupted her own tirades on nothing, to complain that the shredder wasn't working properly. Finally, at one point when she was off on one of her flirt breaks, Heather and I decided it was time to investigate the alleged broken shredder. It turned out that the shredder was completely functional and that it was Jennifer who was not working properly.

After a couple months, the geniuses at FoFo seemed to realize that although we worked our databasing fingers to the bone all day, there was still a huge stack of papers in front of us. It was time to call in temp number three. Heather and I were excited at the prospects for our new best friend. We were hoping for a fun gay guy with whom we could share celebrity gossip and fashion tips. The next morning we made the usual coffee stop at Café.com. TBG had a gig coming up there. We knew this because along with being pummeled with countless flyers, Doug reminded us about it at least 47 times a day. The climb up the foul-smelling stairway was made easier by the excitement of meeting our new partner in temping. I opened the door to Suite 220 and there he sat. He had headphones on and was already hard at work at my computer. Unfortunately, my gaydar on this guy was showing up negative. I introduced myself and got a soft murmur in response, "Hey. Russell." Then he was right back to work, speedily typing in member numbers, as if database fixing was his job. Oh wait, it was our job.

Heather and I were given the exciting news that we would now be working in the office upstairs. This was something we had only dreamed of. Upstairs had windows, sunlight and lots of people about whom we had created stories. It was barely believable that we might actually get to talk to them. Best of all, upstairs was a Toadstool Banditz of Gilgamesh free zone. As we walked down the hallway towards the infamous upstairs office, the smell of patchouli and sweat got stronger with each step. Heather and I were placed at computers on opposite sides of the office. We would silently work on the database updates all morning while soaking in the hippie drama taking place around us. By lunchtime we had lots of information to catch each other up on. "Did you know that Thrushbird used to date Tara?" "No way!" "Yeah, and it turns out that Billy got kicked out of his apartment and he moved in with Ken!"

One day, I was hard at work at the computer in the corner of the room. Piles of books, huge plants and tons of useless office furniture camouflaged my existence. Dina, one of the canvassers, took a break from writing poetry to call a friend. "Dude Kermit…I don't know why they don't hire you in admin. Actually I do, they just like to have those pretty young temps around."

"Thanks!" I shouted from the corner. "I don't know what's more flattering…that you think I'm pretty or that I'm young." Silence from Dina. I smiled at Dina as I walked by, and approached Heather's desk, singing, "Pretty Young Temps, repeat after me, sing na na na…"

The canvassers would gather each day to have their "briefing" in which they would get updates on the areas they were covering that night and any late breaking forest related information. Sometimes there was an educational component like a group viewing of "The Lorax" by Dr. Suess. One day, Chad, who normally led the briefings, began, "First on today's agenda, why does it smell like poop in here?" The man was right. The place reeked of excrement. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the majority of the employees had been wearing the same loose fitting frocks for the last two weeks.

Heather and I ripped open our checks one Friday afternoon and found an extra slip of paper in there. An invitation to the temp agency Christmas party. I was ready to toss it out when the words “Food and Open Bar” called out to me. I was in no position to be turning down free food and drinks. Heather and I decided to go. A couple weeks later the magical evening finally arrived. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we sauntered on over right after work. The bar was filled with temps standing around awkwardly and overly excited temp agency employees duded up in their holiday best. I was sporting the typical FoFo uniform of overalls and sneakers. Just as Heather and I were assessing the crowd, Russell approached us. Except this wasn’t databasing Russell, it was “He likes the nightlife” Russell. Drink in one hand, bacon wrapped scallop in the other, Russell began chatting up a storm. A few minutes into the conversation and it was clear that Russell was a man of the perma-temp variety. The kind of temp that has no intention of finding full-time work. In fact, he was angry that this job was lasting so long, because the only reason he took the job was to ensure that his unemployment checks kept rolling in. Just as I was pondering whether I preferred silent Russell or this new Sir Chat-a-lot Russell, I felt a tugging on my sleeve. “Look who’s here” Heather said quietly. “Doug and Downstairs Mark.” Downstairs Mark was fairly new in the admin department. It was unclear what exactly Downstairs Mark did other than follow Doug around and frequently whine like a six grade girl who was unable to get tickets to an N’Sync concert. The whining ranged from complaining about the ex-wife to your average run-of-the-mill over-dramatization of incredibly insignificant issues. There was the ever popular request for food. “Do you think there’s any way in the world that it would be at all possible for me to have one of your Sun Chips?”

“Yes, Mark. It’s a friggin chip. What kind of evil hag do you take me for?”

“Oh…thanks so much. Really. You’re too nice to me. I owe you one.”

“Yes, you do. I expect one cheddar Sun Chip on my desk, stat.”

So although it was fairly embarrassing, it was no surprise that Mark followed Doug to the temp Christmas party. I stuffed my face with a variety of mini foods and downed a couple gin and tonics while watching Jocelyn, the owner of the temp agency dance around like a lunatic and Downstairs Mark become more embarrassingly drunk by the millisecond. After losing a few rounds of the raffle, I pulled myself away from the excruciatingly dull conversation I was having with a woman who was really loving her front desk reception job, and was on my way. The next day Downstairs Mark showed up at FoFo looking like hell, went running to the bathroom around 10am, puked and then went home. But not before saying, “I’m really really really sorry that I have to go home early…I’d stay if I could but I just don’t feel well at all…you probably hate me….”

Approximately three and a half months after I initially set foot in the dank stinky halls of Forests Forever, I reached the final canary yellow page of membership numbers. It was time to say goodbye to FoFo and GoGo.