It was my first assignment as that peculiar creature of the '90s, the temporary worker; I had been deemed worthy of employment at a law firm in downtown San Francisco. "Your first duty in the morning will be changing the welcome message on the phone machine," my bottle-blond supervisor told me. "After that you need to make the coffee." She gestured toward a large orange-handled pot. This wasn't a temp job, it was a Dilbert cartoon. I cursed the vagaries of the global market that had somehow landed me here, and wished I was back studying history at Stanford.
I am not alone among my classmates. Many of my friends who did not immediately begin graduate school have joined thousands of our peers nationwide in the cubicles of "transitional employment." At Stanford, many students dreamed of and planned for jobs with some opportunity for creative autonomy, social conscience and cerebral pizzazz: public health grant-writer, assistant museum curator, arts reporter, youth issues advocate. But reality bites. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 26 percent of workers last year arrived on the job as temps, contract workers or other "contingents."
No one sets out to do menial work for low pay. But as a humanities graduate, I knew the prospect of finding well-paying meaningful work was not exactly radiant. Magazines like National Business Employment Weekly have recently taken to encouraging fretting students like me to "try temping as an alternative" and "gain experience and insight while earning a few bucks." After weeks of searching for a job without a whiff of success, this began to sound like good advice.
At the first temp agency, which I found in the San Francisco Yellow Pages, I began by taking a multiple-choice test given to assess my honesty. The computer flickered with questions about tact and loyalty, such as "can more experienced employees afford to cut corners in the workplace?" After a battery of tests meant to winnow out laggards, drunkards and churls from the temp pool, I was placed in front of a motivational video. A woman warned prospective temps about the dangers of on-the-job intoxication, workers' comp fraud, falling ladders, and timesheet padding, while offering promises of a decent wage and job satisfaction. With this sage advice and a styrofoam cup of bad coffee, I set forth into the hyped and lacquered "real world" that strikes terror into the hearts of college students everywhere.
A week later, the agency called me with a choice of assignments: counting money in a locked room at the Oakland airport or answering phones for a San Francisco law office. I chose the shorter commute. At the law office, in addition to tending that orange coffee pot, I sat in front of an enormous vase of silk gardenias and got maybe six calls all day. Sitting there, stiff as a starched collar, I contemplated the pros and cons of temping: Free office supplies can make up for low job satisfaction; and trying to create a schedule around temporary work is like forecasting the weather. Just when you expect blue skies, it rains work.
My second and third assignments provided their own surprises. At the second job, a computer consulting firm, a male computer programmer said to me buoyantly, "It's great to have a male secretary. How does it feel to be a male secretary?" I considered answering that it probably felt something like being any other kind of secretary, but instead just handed the guy his latest copy of MacWorld. Later in the afternoon, the office's financial analyst asked me if I had ever considered going to college. I smiled.
On my third assignment at a telecommunications company, another temp hit the wrong button on a voice-mail system, and a recorded message boomed out seductively, "Are you ready to get naked?" The office staff cackled. The temp had inadvertently revealed phone sex as one of the many "communications" hawked by the company.
My fourth temp job brought me around full circle, as I found myself back on the Stanford campus--this time as a worker instead of a student. Back under the protective wing of the University, I reminded myself of the Cardinal Rule of temp work: It's only temporary.
Ari Biernoff, '96, is a freelance writer living in the Bay Area.
