I just finished reading a new essay collection on the future of the labor movement. Half the articles were about how horrible “temporary employment agencies” are; the other half were about the importance of learning skills on the job. Where do these experts think people are going to get this on-the-job training? I got mine tempting.
In my early twenties, I decided I was not going to “sell out” and go to law school, or apply to work for some investment bank. Nope. I was going to be a poet. Luckily, I had four friends of a similarly lyrical bent, and we all wound up living together in a dingy apartment in Cambridge. While waiting for inspiration to strike, we subsisted on bargain beer and macaroni and cheese, slept through the afternoon, smoked like fiends, and hung around listening to music until the money ran out.
When the money ran out, what did we do? We went to Kelly Girl. Because temping was the only line of work that allowed you — once you had enough money to begin the beer-cigarettes-and-naps cycle anew — to stop work immediately. For those of us who Put Poetry First, this was no small matter.
My first temp job was typing grant proposals at the Boston University Department of Communications Disorders. BU then had (maybe it does still) the world’s leading center for the study of speech problems, from lisping to cleft palates to aphasia. The whole staff seemed to have been picked from among its undergraduate patients. The receptionist, for instance, answered the phone with a spirited, “C-c-c-communic-c-c-cation Disorders!” It was a fun-loving group, and at lunch our whole lisping, stuttering, stammering crew would file out to the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square for Budweisers and reubens. (I’d communicate the orders.) On my last day, my boss approached me to say, “We’re really going to miff you.”
Then it was on to the Lemuel Shattuck Memorial Hospital in Jamaica Plain. This was a real slum hospital, full of Medicaid patients and the dying young. I transcribed case reports off a Dictaphone, and they were uniformly horrifying: “16-year-old HIV + black male presented with eight 9-mm gunshot wounds to chest,” or “19-year-old white male presented after gouging out right eye and drinking a pint of carbolic acid.” Trying work, while it lasted.
Merrill Lynch came next. There, I wound up working for a friendly old Brahmin stockbroker we’ll call George Barkstrap. On the first or second day, he asked me if I knew his daughter Roxy, who had been in my college class. That threw me. Roxy Barkstrap was an unhappy, you could even say anguished, girl. Halfway through her sophomore year she’d shaved her head and taken to wearing T-shirts that said “Lesbo Power” and “F– the Breeders.” She had never greeted me without a scowl. What do you say to your boss in that position?
I said, “Yes, I know Roxy. She’s a sweet girl.”
George beamed till I thought he would cry. “Yes, he is,” he said. From then on, he took me for an unusually sensitive reader of human character and filled my days with such assignments as, “Go to the company library. Get the New Yorker and find some articles you want to read. Come back this afternoon and I’ll explain to you what a ‘leveraged buyout’ is.”
Pleasant as the Merrill Lynch job was, it brought me back into contact with some of the more odious of my classmates — the “sell-outs,” as we used to call them back at the apartment as we argued beerily about what to put on the stereo next. These were the dweebs we’d never considered quite stylish enough to invite to our parties. Now they were picking up airline tickets to Hong Kong from their multiple secretaries and giggling derisively as I scampered down to the typing pool to fetch the coffee.
Well. “Good to get that learnt,” as Philip Larkin once wrote. Temping was basically a low-stakes way of learning to work before you knew what you wanted to work at. The lessons of your first job are mostly generic ones: how to wake up, how to dress presentably, how to be polite. Not long after I’d left temping for a “real” job, I was taken out to dinner by a banker friend we used to call — even to his face — “The Bloated Plutocrat.” The restaurant was pricey and the service abysmal.
After one particularly long delay, B.P. hammered the table. When the waiter, a whipped-looking fellow of about 23, arrived. B.P. looked up and said, “You sure are a lousy waiter.”
“I’ll have you know,” the kid said sniffily, “I’m not a waiter by calling.”
“What are ya?”
“I’m an actor.”
My friend snorted and said, “Well, act like a waiter, then!”
The big revelation one has on one’s first job is Boy, do I not want to do this for the rest of my life. There are worse ways than temping of figuring that out.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
