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.