Welcome to this week's selection of Picks, where lately we've been putting in time at Temp 24-7, a site dedicated to the wild and wacky world of temporary employment. Created for temps by temps, the weekly e-zine includes tales of terror, a weekly gripe, a featured temp term, and a truly informative Q&A forum titled "Dear Blabby." Our visit brought back a flood of temping memories, from the days in the Alaskan salt mine to the nights building that strange contraption designed by Rube Goldberg. In fact, now we find ourselves in the middle of a nostalgic reverie, difficult to snap out of... we're flooded with images... and... (*Note to Readers: This is the place in Picks where, had this been a television show, the screen would start shimmering and wavering as if to indicate the beginning of a flashback. Everything would be losing focus, pointing out that we're travelling backwards in time. Please, imagine it for yourselves. Thank you.)
...We were working the phones at Big Al's Coin Laundry and Used-Car Emporium. Sure, the perks were okay (getting to drive a '74 Valiant to fetch lunch; free socks), but if we had to answer one more question about counterfeit vehicle identification numbers, odometer tampering, or separating whites from colors, it would've been a really short ride to the looney bin. Still, all those questions could be avoided if only more people took the time to read Robby Stamps' online book, No Risk: Used Car Buying. Robby goes step by step into the who, why, when, where, and how of purchasing a pre-owned vehicle. From budget to inspection to maintenance, it's all here for the learning. Did you know that three to six year old cars are the best buys? Or that you can get an extended warranty on a used car? True. Bonus fact: You can use hair spray to get an ink stain out of a t-shirt. Oh, the things we learned.
Luckily the assignment at Big Al's lasted only three days, because a friend of a friend of our mother-in-law's uncle got us a gig shuffling papers at the White House. It started out so promising -- those shiny, silvery, jewel-like little trinkets called paper clips held documents together so well. But then our supervisor accused of us surreptitiously bending some of them into shapes that he described as "naughty," and we were forced to defend ourselves. Naturally, we consulted The History Channel's Great Speeches for rhetorical help. With a new speech featured daily, the site boasts an archive of some 75 RealAudio clips, including Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech, Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man in the World" address, and Paul McCartney's announcement that he was not, in fact, dead. Not to mention the vocal stylings of Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles, Mario Cuomo, Colin Powell, Queen Elizabeth, and dozens of others. Alas, none of this influenced our supervisor. We were demoted in rapid succession to staples, post-its, and finally hunting down lost thousand-dollar rubber bands at the Pentagon before we realized "someone" didn't want us around anymore.
Imagine this: Cape Hudson, Antarctica, eighty degrees below zero, ninety-mile-an-hour winds, thirty-six minutes of sunshine a day. We're temping for a small Patagonian firm that specializes in fax maintenance for Antarctic research centers. We're thinking, someone in Washington definitely wants us out of the way. Across the bay, a small band of intrepid adventurers is scaling the face of Rakekniven, an unexplored mountain down here. Each day during lunch we watch the brave effort through a peephole we've punched in the side of our otherwise dark quonset hut. Then we find out that Jon Krakauer (of Everest fame) is telling the story in Scaling the Razor, a splashy National Geographic travelogue that features photographs, diary entries, and ripping yarns of derring-do. At the site you can brave fierce blizzards, harrowing plane rides, and "towering blades of granite." If only we had web access, we muse.
Fortunately our stint in the polar regions didn't last long. A big-hearted individual (who according to court order must remain nameless), secured positions for us as interns at the Weekly World News. Hoo boy, don't get us started. Between Elvis always eating the last donut in the snack room and the copy editor getting abducted by aliens every Friday, it's a wonder we ever got anything to press. But every so often, a hot-breaking news story made it all worthwhile. Case in point: In 1992, the News started covering the public career of an individual whose ravenous appetites and bizarre nocturnal actions have shocked and horrified America and, indeed, the world ever since. We're speaking, of course, of Bat Boy, the half-human half-bat creature found in a West Virginia cave. And now, by popular demand, the "official source for EVERYTHING Bat Boy" gives you all the drama that you've come to expect from the king of supermarket tabs, plus a chance to acquire an official Bat Boy poster of your very own. They're pretty cool posters. Honest.
Still, it all comes right in the end. Looking back on all this, the one thing we've really learned is that you have to be very careful about what you tell your temp agency. For example, on one application, we stated that we were adventurous, fluent in Russian, and a little spacy. Next thing we knew, we were the fill-in crew on Space Station Mir. Sure, it was fascinating to see the planets from way up there, but, heck, we could have done that a lot more easily using NASA's Solar System Simulator. With the simulator you can choose to view any planet in the solar system as seen from any other planet; gaze at Jupiter from Venus or Earth from Pluto, all without leaving your seat. It's convenient, it's fun, and it doesn't involve eating freeze-dried borscht for three whole months with nothing to warm you but an out-of-control fire blazing in the neighboring capsule. Still, to each his own, and we suppose that means in the end that you'll just have to read the classifieds, polish your resume, and take your pick(s).
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