Day 13 in a temp's world

Today was Friday, better known as vacation-at-your-desk-day. I personally had nothing to do today. At all. One of the ladies I assist at the office, does not work on Fridays, and the other one is out sick, (SWINE FLU??) so even if there was something I could do, there was no one around to tell me what to do or how to do it. You see, I am a temp. It is sort of like a private eye. Or a celebrity. Or a paperweight.

I was marooned. Alone in a sea of cubes. And since I had my own private cube today, probably because of the minor "pandemic" (SF!) I had my pick of two different desks. I chose P's desk, because it is set up to face the "door" or cube opening, and in this way I could survey the lay of the land. She is also the woman who is sick, however, and all day I thought about how much SF I might be absorbing through the chair.

My day started out with some light filing. I usually try to keep it very light, which is the best plan, as I have to spread out what little I have to do thinly enough to make enough work for a whole day. My main task for this week was to use highlighter and post-it note flags to mark pages in various client files. This would not have been so bad if there was not a major shortage of post-it note flags in the office. After a couple of days of liberal usage, I was forced to cut back until I was carefully peeling old ones off of out-dated pages and pressing them onto the new ones. My progress in the drawers is evidence of this. The first few filing cabinet drawers I went through look like a parade of colorful banners marching down a busy street. Then, you open the next few drawers and start to see the parade getting a little thin. The banners budget got reduced, you might think. A few drawers later (there are 6 huge filing cabinets wedged into one cube,) you would see a lonely, rag-tag ghetto parade. The banners are reused from last year. Some are taped, the event is short and dismal.

I ran out of flags, of course, around 10am. There was no more I could borrow, and I was out of things to do. It was too early for lunch. I had heard yesterday that there might be some shredding for me in M's office, so I wandered over there. M was glad to show me 4 boxes full of confidential information to be destroyed. Oh good, I thought, this will be enough to spread out over the day if I take it a little at a time. But to my dismay, M took me into the break room and showed me the locking bin that shreddables go into to be professional shredded.

It took me all of 20 minutes to dump all the information into the bin, and then my one and only real task of the day was done. I went back to my desk. P's desk. I waited. I daydreamed, I wrote on a pad of paper until my hand cramped up. I took lunch early. The low point of the day was when I dropped an ear bud into my cup of coffee. Questions arose: should I put the ear bud back in my ear? Should I still drink the coffee?

A coworker (another temp! temp solidarity!) who knew I had nothing to do brought me a printout of an email that everyone got regarding the dreaded swine flu. Realizing that I could turn this into work, I jumped all over that shit. I took out P's complete set of colored highlighters and went to town. It turns out they used the word swine 37 times in a 4 page report. What did I learn? Pigs=bad. Ok, so that was another 20 minutes out of my day.

By that time I had maxed out. I was bored bored bored. I was sick of pretending like I was working, when no one was even LOOKING. I could have been masturbating while shooting up heroine and shaking a baby and no one would have known. Except the security camera. Morale was low.

I finished out my day by cleaning out my coffee mug, straightening some already straight piles, and leaving work 40 minutes early. I doubt anyone noticed.

Day 13, but no end in sight.