the cheese stands alone

All This AND $7 An Hour? Where Do I Sign Up?

The temp agency might have come through at long last. I have a possible gig next week for a company that many many years ago I temped for via a different agency and was hired on permanently until I was laterally promoted to a division that was gobbled up by a bigger yet more tightfisted division and I was made redundant.
That is a longass sentence. Let's break for a rest and recovery and meet back here in ten.
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So anyway, for a least a while I will be carefully edging back from the financial precipice. I hold no illusions that this will become a permanent job, as did it previously, as the assignment is the silliest second most unique I've ever been pitched: I am to retrieve the voicemails of execs who are travelling and email the transcriptions to them.
Seriously. These people are too busy to check voicemail but they can get to their email? I guess in between porn surfing during conference calls and sending each other the latest Dilbert, they find time to see if "You've got mail!" I know I do would.
I really shouldn't be surprised. During my permanent employment there, one of my regular duties was to white-out various items in documents that one of my execs wanted changed. Either he was too good to handle something as lowly as white-out, or he just didn't understand the process.
As you climb the ladder in this company, you lose both basic skills and personality points. I've seen a lowly graphics guy with a sweet disposition and great talent be advanced up the ranks until he was an assistant vice-prez with the attitude of a Mike Leavitt self-righteous know-it-all and the abilities of a PETA freak brain-damaged weasel. I've seen a department sub-manager blow make her way up to division office manager and forget how to push the elevator buttons (I'm dead serious here... she had to have someone press the buttons for her, as she'd acquired a killer set of nails and couldn't risk them.)
Big corporations have advantages for us transient scum temps, however. As long as I've temped, I've never wanted for home office supplies, and no one hits up the temp for contributions for birthdays, showers, or mitzvahs. I am the fly on the wall and the world (for the length of this assignent anyway) is my blog fodder.
No, I won't be blogging from work, because I remember that of all the divisions in this company, only the I.T. boys had any brains and don't hesitate to use them. Back in my first flush of new employee-ism with the corp, I wrote a scathing review of a coworker's fashion choices to a friend, and an I.T. nerd tried to blackmail me into a date with the scavenged evidence. (I bought him off with brownies and tales of my gun-toting very jealous husband.) But good old pen and paper is still a skill I possess and I'll be watching and paper-blogging until I get home to my own little piece of web.
Not to mention the two hour each way commute via our illegal alien and unwashed scum filled public transit system should be blog material for a while in itself. And a good reason for me to update my tetanus shot.
My loss of useful time and sanity is the blog's gain, I always say.
And yes, I do realize that just a few blogseconds ago I was whining about my lack of finances and job options, etc... I reserve the right, as owner and operator of this fine establishment, to babble as the winds of impulse move me and be as self-contradictory as the mood requires. As my mom says, I'd bitch if they hung me with a new rope.