Temp Hell

I was working as the program assistant for a small, non-profit company in upstate New York. We had a temp agency we used to staff our reception position, and it was like a revolving door. In the year I worked in this company, we had seven temps at our front desk. They ranged from inappropriate dress to filing unfinished work to calling in sick every single Thursday. One even painted her toenails at her desk. It was the office joke – we wouldn’t even learn their name before there’d be a new face at the desk. It was very stressful and demotivating for all of us in the office.

I was working for a big-time company, doing strictly data entry. I’d been there nearly a year and my contract was coming to an end. They had 12 month contracts, unrenewable. Either you got hired at the end, or you were out. This caused a lot of resentment in the temp staff; they would often get rid of you at the end of your contract, just to replace you with another temp because they weren’t allowed to hire anyone perm.

As my contract neared its end, I lost morale and motivation. I knew I wasn’t getting hired on; my team was full. My productivity waned, then it stopped. Since we were doing data entry, we were allowed to watch movies or listen to music, as well as use AIM, as long as we continued working. I allowed myself to totally stop working and just goof off every day. I did no work, zero zip zilch, all day every day for three weeks. I kept checking in with my team leader, asking for work, but she never had much for me to do, so I just didn’t do anything. I watched ‘Firefly’ and chatted with my friends.

Finally, my contract ended. On my very last day, my temp service called me into their onsite office and told me, since I’d been such an excellent employee, they would like to extend my contract an additional month.

I blinked at them. A lot. I’d done no work whatsoever, and no one noticed. Not only had they not noticed, they thought I was a model employee and extended my contract for an additional month – an unheard of bonus!

I accepted the bonus month, but was very demotivated by the utter lack of noticing my slackerness. What an awful situation.

I had a temp, I’ll call her Tammy, come in to perform our basic reception and filing duties. She had the job for about a month and then decided to leave so we replaced her. When the new temp came in I asked her to get a piece of correspondence and she said that she couldn’t find it in the file. After a little investigation we realized that the previous temp had been filing every piece of correspondence in my law office under “L”, for Letter!

A few years ago, I got an assignment to work at a place that sold storage. When I got there, I learned that one of their two salesmen was out of the office because he had to appear in court for an assault charge, and I was there in his place. I also learned that after he returned, the other salesman was going to have a few days off to compensate him for having to deal with the increased workload because the other guy was gone. Things were okay with the first guy, but things started to get weird when I had to work with the second guy. He was probably the creepiest person I’d ever met. He showed me his weird, gory drawings and talked about various violent things he had done. When he found out I was in a relationship, he asked me personal questions and made disgusting comments about my relationship. All in all, a bad experience, but thankfully I only worked with him for two days.

When I was taking a series of tests at a temp agency, a fellow applicant snuck out a calculator to work the simple addition problems we were supposed to work by hand.

At one place I worked at, I was contracted as a security analyst with an organization that had two sets of standards: One for contractors, and one for ‘real’ employees.

When working as a hired gun, I wear a suit and tie to look professional. It makes a good impression on the company that’s paying your employers if you’re clean-cut and look respectable, right? At said outfit, I was written up twice (formal reprimands from my boss and boss’ boss) for pretending to be management, ostensibly so that I didn’t have to work. I started wearing a turtleneck and jeans, and everything was hunky-dory insofar as the dress code was concerned.

At another gig, they went through the exit interview procedure in the CISSP study guides step by step after my contract was up: Guards escorting me to the boss’ office, four hours of questions pertaining to what I was working on, how I did it, whose contact information I had,
what I could and couldn’t talk about, the whole nine yards.

And then they erased about ten gigs of stuff from my laptop’s hard drive. Some non-sensitive work-related stuff, some e-mails that had been queued in my local inbox, some documentation that I’d downloaded from vendors’ websites, and a boatload of e-books that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was working on. They also torched my USB keys and checked the CDs I had in my backpack.

I was working for a small printing company in Chicago through a well-known temp agency. I had a two-hour round trip making $9/hour. I was the receptionist, though I use the term lightly; they got maybe 5 calls a day. I spent most of my time begging for work or surfing the internet (with permission). I worked for them for the standard 90 days, then they extended my contract. They began to promise me that they would hire me on permanent and full-time with benefits and a hefty raise as soon as they had this new phone system in place.

Another month passed, full of promises and as-soon-as’s. I kept working, doing all my work and the work of a couple other people, just to fill the time. The president and vice pres of the company loved me and were making these promises to me in person. Another month passed, still with the promises of hiring me on. Finally, after a second round of the 90 day waiting game, the manager started writing up a contract for me. They offered me $1/hour raise, but I had to pay for my own benefits, which meant I would be making $2/hour less than what I made as a temp! I had my temp agency negotiate on my behalf, which was required since I was still the agency’s employee, and I wound up not only not getting hired, but being replaced by a different temp.