What happens when you think too much about...

I worked as a waiter for a period of time in Middle Villiage, Queens. It's a black-hole of a neighborhood, just beyond the reach of the M train. Far enough away from the commercial center of the city that the inhabitants turn their backs on Manhattan and say things like "I'm from Middle Villiage". A bastion of incestuous ignorance fiercely guarded by the Italian-American populous and perhaps doomed for eternity due to its lack of a subway stop.

To be fair, I loved where I worked and the manager loved me back. I still think about the people that I used to work with once in a while. The waiter who trained me was an Italian guy named Simone. He was really Italian, though, not one of the Tony Soprano-wanna-be locals that frequented our quiet little restaurant. Simone was tall, skinny, and prone to giving advice. Simone never went to college and had been working in restaurants his whole life, so his advice wasn't like the advice that I was used to getting. It wasn't goal-oriented advice. It just vaguely related to his own meandering experience.

One day I was sitting outside during a slow lunch-shift, watching the cars go by on Metropolitan Avenue, and a guy in a shitty little gray car slammed in to a line of cars stopped at a light. It was a fender-bender, so no one was more than a little shaken-up. I can remember the guilty guy's sad, slow movements as he sat in his car realizing what the fuck just happened. I followed his eyes as he watched the man in the injured car jump out with his glasses hanging off his face and hurry to check on his small daughter in the back seat. It took about a second for his day to make a 180-degree turn for the toilet.

I was excited to tell Simone all about it when he showed up for the dinner-shift that night. I explained the scenario in vivid detail while he cleaned some wine glasses at the bar. He was surprisingly un-phased by my dramatic rendition of the afternoon's incident, although I've never been much of a story-teller. His response was pretty simple, "Billy, you remember the things I tell you right? Well... I used to think about pussy all the time, man. See what happens when you think too much about pussy?"

Asshole with a face

When I first moved to New York I got an internship assisting with the promotion of a shitty, over-the-hill, French band. There was one other intern in the makeshift office in Chinatown. When I showed up on the first day, the boss introduced me to the other intern and promptly started squabbling with him about how he hadn't been posting enough ads on myspace. Our main objectives as interns was to spam bloggers about the band, add as many friends as possible on their myspace account, and watch while our boss rolled delicate cigarettes and smoked them in the shade of the scaffolding out front. It took me a few days to realize it was a shitty job and another few days to realize the boss was a total asshole. I stuck around for about a week or two to use their internet because I still didn't have any in my apartment. The first time I butted heads with the boss he called me a retard. My face must've gotten red, but I didn't say anything, I must have been so surprised. When I got home that night he wrote me an email asking if I could send him a link to an instrument rental company I'd been researching. I wrote him back and told him to go fuck himself and never heard from him again... Until today.

I'm temping at an office where he now works. He just walked in and saw me at the front desk, did a double-take, shook my hand and said "interesting".

I realized right then that you can spend your whole life running from assholes. You can run from every asshole boss, every asshole co-worker, and every asshole with a face. But, no matter how far you run, an asshole might find you, look you right in the eyes and say: "interesting".

They Hope You'll Just Say "Yes"

Yesterday was a particularly strange day on Standby. After waiting three hours for an assignment at the Staffing company and a scant fifteen minutes before I was allowed to go home, a friendly staffing consultant comes to tell me that there's a "clerical" position available at Macmillan Press. The other temps laugh as I leave, taunting me with their plans for an afternoon in the park.

When I get through security at the Flatiron Building, my contact, Verna, is sitting in a cluttered two-room office in the midst of a move. Cardboard boxes, useless looking office supplies, and books that never sold clutter the small space. Verna, a slight but fast-moving woman, and her office neighbor, a hugely obese woman, are simultaneously flirting-with and bossing-around a middle-aged white man in sweat pants. This way that admin-lifers speak with men, this sort of flirt/bossing is part manipulation and part survival behavior. They speak so sweetly and smartly that you barely notice you're doing their work. Ensnaring gullible men into hours of favor-work with their lulling chatter. Like sirens on the seas of old, one must not lose himself in their song.

The first thing Verna says to me is "why are you wearing a tie? You're going to be filthy in an hour". With a sinking heart, I hang up my shirt and tie and I follow Verna into the elevator. We get off at the mail room. A large troll of a man named Rodney is in charge of Macmillan's mail. He has walled-eyes and two long yellow bottom-teeth that fit comfortably into the space above them where his top teeth used to be. Verna introduces us.
"Rodney, this is William, he's here to help out with... whatever, today." Rodney seems genuinely happy to make my acquaintance while I'm left thinking about all of the horrible things "whatever" could mean. They stick me inside of a freight elevator with a pile of old and unused sheet-rock that's piled above my head on a flat dolly cart. I get into the elevator and guide the cart inside, feeling the elevator car lurch downwards under the immense weight of the sheet-rock. What if it all just ended like this? Buried under 400lbs of some company's old, useless shit... I don't know how I could explain that to the rest of the souls in the great beyond. The dramatic retelling of my story would just seem so... point-less.

Rodney and Verna meet me at the sub-level and we work the sheet-rock out of the elevator and into storage. The sub-basement is a dark and dimly lit cavern, with ancient brick walls and a gritty concrete floor. Verna explains that the job is to move a huge stack of filthy office chairs, saturated with years of grit, across a small divider into another space. At this point, my shock and curiosity at the ridiculous situation have given way to anger and frustration. I feel utterly furious at the temp agency for expecting me to do this work under the label of "clerical". Requiring me to dress in business casual and then sending me to do manual labor!? Dance, puppet... Dance!!
Verna bids me to speak now if I think that this job isn't for me. And speak I do, for speak I must. Being trampled by a temp agency for $shit.50/hour would just be too spineless.

So I collect my things and head out into the heat. It's 91 degrees, so I strip down to a t-shirt and eat a chicken salad sandwich in Madison Square park before the lunch rush.

Bird Shit and Bad Luck

I've never been a particularly superstitious person. I've never owned a horse-shoe, a rabbit's foot, or any other lucky-animal-part. I guess I've just never felt the need. But, with my new temping "career", I feel like I've somehow become more in-tune with the fates. I've found myself noticing accidents, omens and all things that come about by happenstance. Yesterday I saw a guy talking to his girlfriend in Bryant Park. When he stood up to leave the ass of his pants was smeared with white and yellow pigeon shit. I spent a good portion of my lunch break trying to rationalize why this particular man sat in bird shit. What could he have done to deserve this?

For centuries philosophers have debated the amount of control that we humans actually have over our lives. Are we really as free as we think we are...?
I don't know the answer... But I do know that as a temp you can consciously forgo all control over your day-to-day. So, if you've ever asked yourself: "why am I here?" or "why should I bother doing anything when the universe will just determine my fate anyway?", try signing on to a standby temping program. You'll never want to leave anything to fate again.... ever.