Life Cycle of the Common Temporary

Paperwork flies through the air like planes over Gatwick...swooping and darting from office to office, file to file, folder to folder. Hopefully some will land in the right place; there is an audit tomorrow and we need our ducks in a row, not squabbling over bread at an old woman’s feet.

There is much to sort out, but whenever I stand up ready to launch into a buerocratic shock and awe, I am overcome with weariness and fall back into the chair. The chair rolls backwards and rotates slowly like some rubbish ride at a grim travelling funfair. I end up facing the filing cabinets. Their sight does not inspire me and I let out a theatrical sigh.

By this time I am getting Funny Looks.

So I rifle through a briefing that needs to be put in the right folder and find the photocopy of an old article from the Evening Standard denouncing our station as the most dangerous in London (based on data supplied by the British Transport Police). I discover that you are fifty per cent more likely to be involved in an incident of violent crime here than at the second worst station.

This is unsurprising and provides us with the hard evidence behind the sense of unease in which I have previously indulged. Put simply, this whole place feels rotten. The people, the place, the job...all rotten. There is woodworm here and it has burrowed its way into all of our heads now.

Let’s see...I have been here somewhere around eleven weeks. Last Thursday was the first day I experienced that overwhelming force, the desire to get the hell out of this place that always creeps up on me while temping at any given place.

No...that’s not entirely true. There was that one other time a few weeks ago when I had that feeling, documented here, which soon passed when the catalyst for the situation was proven the next day to be Bollocks. But if we bet without such false alarms, Thursday was when I felt the bad force this time. So on Saturday I bought a bottle of Ardbeg single malt and drank a silent toast to my own ineptitude in being too gutless to quit.

The life cycle of any temporary administration job seems to be the same. It begins with a feeling of resentment that your period of resting between jobs is about to end. No more stolen weeks sitting cross-legged on the sofa, nibbling at a doughnut and drinking coffee whilst the latest edition of Your Property Is Not Painted A Fashionable Colour rumbles along in the background. You realise in some abstract way that you need the money, but your first thought is to turn the job down. Not near enough to home, or it involves too much phonework, or the hours are inconvenient...all masking the One True Reason. You know that the world should be paying you for idling around at home and tossing off the occasional bon mot over cocktails in the evening and generally being a tip-top charming epicurist, wit and gentleman of derring-do and high adventure. Generally by this time you have gone fucking nuts and need to be slapped back into reality.

Once you overcome this cabin fever you ring the agency back and meekly agree to your 37 hours a week.

The first few days go by fast and you feel Good. You learn a few names and find out who must be Avoided at all costs. You do not rock the boat and make waves, and instead concentrate on working out what all this new terminology means. What the hell is a SPAD? Is it an acronym or a verb? And why do all your passengers start screaming when you indulge in a furtive one? Ah...because that signal was at red for a reason. Whoops.

After the first week, the feelings sour as you fall into a routine and discover that you are inessential. This is crushing for many reasons. Chiefly, it is the mundanity of your role, the wretched pointlessness of your attendance, and the clinging darkness in which you exist as each tick of the clock tears into your soul like a knife, gouges out a generous chunk and tosses it out of the nearest window.

If your office even has a damn window, that is. But when your workload is light, or merely repetitive, you look at the clock every five minutes and discover that time has come to a grinding halt. This is an horrifying paradox...you are more aware than ever of the passage of time and indeed your life, but you are also cursing the fact that time has become stuck like an obese man in a water slide. How do you break this deadlock? What can kickstart reality and get it purring in a nice, safe medium gear?

Yes, it is time to rearrange your desk. Somewhere around the third week you rearrange like you have never rearranged before. You consider whether the scissors look best in that subsection of the stationery holder, or that one. You try and do like you have read on various job descriptions by “creating new procedures”, which means half-heartedly sorting the contents of your in-tray into different box files and then dumping them in somebody else’s office.

By this time you feel you have been working there for months, if not years. The calendar reveals you have been in the office for a total of fifteen days. You jaw drops so heavily it disappears through the carpet with an audible pop and brains a typist on the floor below.

At week six the thousand-mile stare appears. You are no longer conscious of your actions and begin to turn into Norman Stanley Fletcher, telling yourself you are just biding your time, my son, biding your time.

By week nine you have found a way to pass the time that looks like you are working. More weblogs start this way than for any other reason.

After three months you wake up from your stupor, look around in quiet desperation and realise that there is so much going on in the world and you are still raking around the same old coals. You find your hand flying to your mouth to suppress a scream. You begin jabbering to yourself, sweat beads on your forehead and you can no longer comprehend what the hell all this paper surrounding you is for.

Wiping away the sweat you grab the nearest thing from your in tray and realise it is something you have been putting off dealing with for weeks. Bug-eyed and grinning madly, you tear it up into tiny pieces and push it right to the bottom of the bin. Then you do it again, and again, until suddenly you have “dealt with” more work in ten minutes than the last month put together. Your colleagues begin to watch in confusion as you chuckle and mutter insanely to yourself, your face beginning to resemble Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther films when he hears that Inspector Clouseau has been assigned to the case.

By now you are on a downward slope and are no good to anyone. Then somebody asks you to do some typing...there is a job advertisement to write. You begin to read, and notice with twisted amusement that the job is similar to yours, only embellished into something that sounds useful. Then you realise this is your job; they are finding someone permanent to fill your post. And this was how they were letting you know you were no longer required. You silently wonder why the manager didn’t just pull a lever under his desk and catapult you out the window.

“Are you going to apply for it?” asks a colleague.

Instead of replying, you begin to giggle, gently at first, but soon building to a raging crescendo of broken mirth. Then your head slumps onto the desk as if you have been shot from behind.

“Jesus!” the colleague screams. “He’s gone into some kind of coma! Where’s the list of qualified first aiders? Who was supposed to type it up, laminate it and stick it up on the wall?”

For a moment a humourless smile plays around your lips as you lapse into blissful unconsciousness. The life cycle is over...

...only to begin again in a few weeks. One of these days you really will put in that application form to be an astronaut, but for now the agency will sort you out. They always do.