Going places/ smashing faces
The grocery store by my work has a luncheonette that features two slices of pizza and a soda for $2.99, and so I can sit in there at lunchtime with the other workers of the world, the most unfathomably mundane place in the world. A ceiling-mounted television monitor plays nonstop deadpan drivel up above. It’s as though even the news is extra-mundane in the mid-day, nothing seeming to do much of anything. Still, though, there we all are, feigning attention, as there’s nothing much else to do. It’s kind of funny, this random cross section of workers: the postal employee and other uniformed workers of the world coalescing as one. I almost feel like there’s probably some fraternal handshake that I should be enacting before realizing it’s really only the fifth day, and I’m a temp. Already, I feel like I deserve a gold star. What the hell is wrong with me?

The way my job is set up is in numbers and production. Every exam you score is monitored, and while they like you to score efficiently, they want you to completely whip ass and do as many exams as possible, which isn’t entirely reasonable. One of my coworkers, I have been told, scores over one thousand questions a day, which desecrates my current total of about 250. I shake my head in light of this pronouncement. One thousand, I think, before totally spacing-out again. You end up grading the same question for days on end, and it starts kicking it to you. I have methods of breaking down the time, look at the clock, annoy the girl next to me, who has taken to punching me in the arm at full force. “Do you want me to move?” I ask her yesterday. “Nah, it’s cool,” she lets me know. Judy, the 70 year-old retiree, who is our supervisor, presides over us. “Do you want me to throw you out of here?” she says with authority. “Don’t think I won’t do it,” she says facetiously. Order is restored, which it often has to be.

Checking out some of the people in here. Everyone I work with seems to be in some state of transition, although such is the nature of temp work. There is no real stasis, and therein lies the beauty of it. A lot of these people are retires or recent college graduates, with nothing else lined up. I try and figure out exactly where I fit in. I’ve graduated college long enough ago that I probably defy the transitional student-type while still not being able to align myself precisely with the retirees. I don’t know. There does seem to be some kind of schism between the people who are really busting ass and the people who just don’t give a fuck, as evidenced by the numbers. I realize we’re all getting paid at the same rate, whether you score 200 or 1000 a day and so I take my time. Some vibe of paranoia manifests, though, as the monitoring system in place lets no mistake go unnoticed. One misstep and they’re calling you over to see why you erroneously scored that question a 2 when it should have a been a 4. No wrong move goes unnoticed. “Are you sleeping over there?” Judy wants to know. I’m probably about another day away from being fired, I realize, as my numbers are presumably low. Out in the hall, I see Judy and ask her, “Are my totals really that significantly lower than everybody else’s?”
“Oh, no,” she tells me, “they’re on average. I was only fooling around with you.” Oh, I say. I guess it’s settled, then. I’m not getting off so easy.