The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune (Temp Town Dispatches, Vol. 2)

I love getting emails like these in my inbox about prospective jobs that include sentences like these.

MUST have been employed directly through a law firm with good tenure. This is NOT a job for someone who has been temping a lot. If you feel that your background matches the above description, please send resume to me.

I wasn't planning on applying for this job anyway, mind you, since they asked for other things I didn't have and it's outside of any area I have much knowledge in, but nonetheless seeing your likely continued fate spelled out in explicit terms like that makes for a lousy way to start one's working day. And it's not as if it makes any difference; those of us stuck in Temp Town know full well that people who have been stuck down here (for whatever reason) that this listing wasn't meant for us.

The danger comes when you get it in your head that you're not qualified for any job listing. When combined with long, draining work hours, you just stop bothering to apply for jobs after a while; you just kind of assume that the sentences in boldface apply to every job listing out there.

You just want to say "Look. I know I'm screwed. Could you at least try not to rub it in my face like that?! Is that really too much to ask?"

You learn, at one level, to let it roll off you like water off a duck's back. This wasn't even meant as a slight at me personally, and really, most of the slights one encounters in Temp Town are inadvertent. Every once in a while, you run across an imperious associate or partner, or a power-tripping support staff person, who likely gets treated like dirt by their bosses and subconsciously decide they're going to take it out on other people; if those people have some advanced degree but you get to boss them around nonetheless, even better.

And there's very little you can do to these people, but that sort of goes without saying. Without going into unnecessary detail, There are ways of making life more difficult for them, but you're never going to get the satisfaction of them knowing that you're getting back at them; you just can't afford that sort of luxury. You just have to think of yourself as an Agent of Fortune, so to speak, a vehicle through which karmic debts are repaid. Blessed with a higher breaking point than many, I have yet to succumb to the urge to pull off anything in this vein, but I've seen it done.

Anyhow, the little slights aggregate over time - the hall monitors, the petty rules changes - and when you throw in a few rejection letters from job applications, and the awkwardness that comes when someone asks you what firm you work for - it can leave someone feeling pretty low.

Sense And Sensitivity (Temp Town Dispatches, Vol 1)

Lately, as days off have grown fewer and further between, I've been noticing one of the worst aspects of Temp Town that don't directly involve working conditions or the way the rest of the legal profession treats you as an untouchable.

When I'm on the clock or just off it (at either end) I notice that I'm more sensitive and in general and irritable in particular. That which is easy to ignore out in the open seems harder to suffer. I don't know if it's a lack of sleep, or boredom, or what it is. But something changes. The little tics and mannerisms of one's coworkers are thrown into high relief. Their speaking tendencies get noticed and scrutinized. Memoranda from supervisors and bosses about small matter at work that are objectively relatively benign can morph in one's mind into personal slights to one's dignity.

One person's tendency to act as self-appointed expert on everything, fond of confusing her various opinions with objective fact and smugly declaring them, seems to annoy exponentially more as the waking hours spent in a room where she isn't there grow shorter and more precious. I feel like I know her better than some of her relatives do, and I don't really want to know her. Another one's bizarre sense of entitlement cloaked in what might be self-deprecating humor grows more tiresome the more words she spends declaiming the not-all-that-dire straits she finds herself in.

I have my moments where I sound more like Larry David than someone truly put upon. I think the difference is that at some level I am aware that my concerns are often petty, so I tend to keep them to myself. Many of them revolve around my commute.

I wonder if being married is like this, except that one get to choose one's spouse and no one in this line of work gets to choose his coworkers. I certainly see way more of the people in this office than I do anyone else right now, and it's possible some of my married coworkers see more of me than they do their spouses.

Not all jobs are like this. Usually you hit it off with someone, and can develop good friendships, since shared adversity (such as it is) can bond people closer together. But that doesn't always happen.

Sometimes I think thoughts that make me not want to like myself much. Perhaps most people are like that, except some of them are missing the mechanism that tells them "Let's pull ourselves together and not act on what we know are bad impulses."

Existence in this sort of space makes one notice, and be sensitive to, small changes that in most contexts would go unnoticed. Small changes in temperature, general background noise level, the proximity of other people, the conversational tone of coworkers, the subject matter of conversations around you, the way one perceive the extent to which one's employers are watching closely, the way the workplace rules are changed (implicitly or explicitly).

And the little things can loom large.

For over a week I have watched my beloved Twix bars in the vending machine, buried beneath three Baby Ruth bars that I don't want. And finally someone has removed the last obstacle between me and that tasty combination of cookie, caramel, and chocolate that I so adore. And when the man who fills the vending machine comes by, I silently observe him place the candy bars into the slots that will determine what I do when the inevitable 2:00 food coma kicks in. In the normal world, off the clock, no way would I spent so much mental energy on how many candy bars stand between me and the Liberation of the Exalted Twix.

And I find it's not even just at work, but during the commute to or from work as well. I notice breaches of the little, mostly unwritten rules of acceptable rider behavior on Metro - people who stand on the left on the escalators, people who partially block the train doors when it's not their stop and there's plenty of room further in the train, people who stop at the top or bottom of the escalators because they're not sure where they're going next - that are relatively easy for me to ignore at other times. On those thankfully relatively rare times where I need to hit the roads during rush hour, nerves are more easily frayed when I'm going to or from work.

The slightest damn thing that happens on the Beltway can mean 30 minutes more time stuck on the road. And even a little precipitation is enough to foul absolutely everything up. And time never moves so fast as when you're trying to get to work so you can clock in...and never as slowly as when you're sitting there in the office.

And when I get home, not finding parking on my block, increasing ever so marginally the distance I'm going to have to carry my backpack and gym bag the next morning, just irks me more than by all rights it really should. Especially on any day where there's a chance I'll have to scrape ice or brush snow off the car.


I have no experience with the military or prison but I imagine that they might experience the same sort of sensitivities that seem petty and silly from a distance but not within the moment. And I'm guessing that in those sorts of environments, since the threat of death or bodily harm generally hangs in the air, some sort of survival instinct kicks in every so often that provides one with the sense of perspective that keeps one from wallowing too much in the moment. But seldom does such perspective come in Temp Town. A form of it surfaces when one learns that the end of the job, whether for everyone or just for you, will occur in the immediate future - but even then, it's generally on to the next gig before long. Not that I want to operate with my life in danger per se, mind you, I'm just saying that the small stuff would be harder to sweat if the proverbial Big Stuff were to surface. But it doesn't come; it's all small stuff.

At least until my next day off.

Temp Town

What is Temp Town?


It's where you might end up if you made it through law school, passed a bar exam or two, but still somehow, one way or another, fell through the cracks of the legal profession. And being here will teach you all the different ways that that could have happened to people. It's a culture all its own, a veritable Island of Misfit Toys. People from all walks of life, with only the law license in common, can be found here. Calling the work professional might (generally) be something of a stretch, but it's not quite a proletarian experience either. You won't get rich doing it, especially considering how far in hock you probably went for that JD - but if you play your cards right, you can feed, clothe, and house yourself, and maybe even treat yourself to the ocassional fine dinner or snazzy gadget.



When you walk out of the work space - whether it's for an hour at lunch, for the night, or for forever - it's as if it doesn't exist. Your fate and the fate of whatever matter you're working on aren't connected in any meaningful way. Maybe you have a work ethic, or maybe your boss is good at figuring out if you do good work or whether you do much work. And maybe not.

If you're lucky, it's like visiting the Wood Between The Worlds, just a way station on one's way somewhere else. If you're not careful, though, it becomes something of a way of life.

Like much of nature, the profession's pretty good at kicking you when you're down. While here you never get to prove to anyone that you can do anything outside Temp Town, and it's assumed that you don't belong anywhere else after a while. It's sort of like an aspiring actress who ends up doing a few porn movies. Once you're a "porn actress," no one else is going to want to cast you.

As I am fond of saying, it beats sewing buttons on shirts in Bangladesh for $3.00 a day. And most working-class people don't generally like their jobs. They have to be bribed to do them.

I guess I am bribed pretty well, all things considered.

No one knows for sure if it's a place where one can hide from the elements of the job market, a fallback one can count on if he can find no other way to pay the bills. No one knows if the well that nourishes this strange landscape will dry up. It doesn't seem terribly efficient from a client's point of view, and yet it's much more efficient than the traditional law firm model of things.

Everything has a price and a value, and they're not necessarily related.

Temp Town is nothing like Hell as depicted in the Divine Comedy, but it can be quite a bit like Hell as depicted in No Exit.

It's where our hero now finds himself.