It Has Come To This

I am a wanderer on the road less travelled, which, it turns out, leads directly to a temp agency.

That’s when you know you’re scraping the bottom of the career septic tank, when you’re busting out the pumps and the man-jacket to explain to a person wearing a nametag how your Master’s degree qualifies you to answer a ten-line phone system. It’s even worse when the truth comes out that that your average ten-line phone system can very easily kick your ass down the block, up the alley, and through the lobby of the 7-11.

I passed an entire day applying at two temp agencies, because if you are going to whore yourself, you might as well go the whole nine and just totally soak that diploma in the toilet. They made me type, and demonstrate proficiency in Word, and also Excel, which I can navigate about as well as a nuclear reactor. You know you’re tanked when you wind up learning how to do things while taking the test. The Excel exam had this default where, the more questions you got wrong, the easier it got, and by the end they were asking me to demonstrate my accounting shiznit skeels by bolding cells and—this is the right hand to God truth--“Access the command for the Help feature.”

One of them made me fill out a written test, and the questions were like, “How often are you late?” and there was no option for “perpetually,” so I just put the next closest thing, which was “Never.” I was also asked to answer a true or false question that read thusly: “When a customer angers you, it is okay to resort to physical violence.” I want to meet anyone who put “true” there, I really do, because I’m hiring that sumbitch to bounce at my next Derby party.

apply at blondechampange@hotmail.com