I forgot to mention that I managed to fanagel my way into summer employment. I’m doing data entry for a local hospital as a temp, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. My duties consist of copying text from one program and pasting it into another, and that’s it, for eight hours a day.  I don’t answer phones, I don’t make copies or mail things I just copy and paste. Normally this is the type of thing a computer could just take care of itself automaticly, but because of the particular nature of the data it’s a task that’s just slightly beyond the capabilities of the average computer; something that makes me feel incredibly useful and useless at the same time.

To be honest though, it’s not a bad gig under the circumstances.  I have my own office (with a door! And a window!) They let me listen to my ipod all day and the coffee/tea maker makes surprisingly tasty (and free) caffeine filled beverages to keep me going till 5pm.

By far the best thing I appreciate about this position is the fact that it’s a somewhat lengthy assignment (six weeks) which provides a stability I have a newfound appreciation for after hopping around from office to office every other day when I first started working for the agency.  That was an experience that left me feeling like some kind of cross between a migrant farm worker and a substitute teacher. I was around just long enough to learn everyone’s name and figure out the way things worked at that particular office before leaving forever and starting the process all over at the next assignment.

The other thing I’ve come to realize about temping is that there’s a good chance that each office I’m sent to will be in a frantically busy, stressed out state; This is the reason they called in a temp after all.  Sometimes I like to pretend like I’m some kind of office work superhero, traveling from cubicle farm to cubicle farm, wherever there’s just too much paperwork to deal with or copies to be made, I swoop in and save the day. BAM! BOP! THWACK!