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 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!

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.