Seven Red

When I first got out of college I had the worst temp job in New York. I wasn’t really planning on staying in New York, so I didn’t see the sense in getting a full time job at that time. In any case, this job was at a certain mid-sized investment house – to remain unnamed (let’s just say it was located in the utterly obnoxious “Lipstick” building at 53rd and 3rd, ahem). I graduated in December, so it was prime temp time, as tax season was getting warmed up, and mid-sized investment houses needed to do all kinds of logistics for their clients, mainly related to getting statements out.

And what a way to get them out. The operations department – where I worked – had an old dot-matrix mega printer, a preposterous machine roughly the size of a mature rhinoceros. The full time people would run these reports, then they’d come out of the printer, then we’d have to separate them, collate them, staple them, fold them, put them in envelopes, and finally run them through a Pitney-Bowes, all manually. Oh, I shouldn’t forget: since the printer was, even then, this ancient relic probably bought second-hand from the fucking Phoenix Program, it spit out the paper on turning wheels, with those absurd little punched-out circles on the paper edges supposedly aligning everything, the kind you still see on some government forms. So, before collating, stapling, folding, inserting, and stamping, we also had to rip the alignment edges off the reports. Thousands of them. Of course, since the giant dot-matrix was ancient, and since this technique for printing things was never very smart in the first place, the damn thing kept misfeeding, so somebody had to stand by the printer all day preventing and correcting the misfeeds, which usually occurred when more than, say, six consecutive reports were printed in a row. Thousands of reports. I actually volunteered for this grisly misfeed duty, which everyone else considered about the equivalent of scooping out a barracks latrine, primarily because the rhythm and solitude was strangely comforting, even if the rhino would go haywire now and again. The firm had hired three temps to assist with all these ridiculous procedures, since there were only two full time people doing that sort of work. Lucky me. The cast of characters was something like this:

Temp 1 (we’ll call her Tasha): A black girl from Brooklyn, maybe 20. She had the whole “I-could-give-a-fuck-less-if-you-died-on-the-spot” look down pat, but she was really a sweet person. She had a boyfriend, Donell, who was constantly beeping her, by her request, since he was also constantly cheating on her. How exactly beeping her twelve to eighteen times a day was supposed to prevent this was a mystery to me, until I started to understand her complex system of suspicion and interpretation, by which some interval between beeps indicated any number of remote actions by the boyfriend, each of which she was happy enough to discuss. Once, taking the subway with her to the temp agency because of some time card screw up, she told me that she needed a thug, and that was the cause of all the boyfriend problems. I wish it was in response to something cool, like a rejection of an unwanted advance, but it was completely blurted out and off topic. I think I nodded, mumbling something about time cards.

Temp 2 (we’ll call him Adward): A black guy from Brooklyn, maybe 22. He gave off the impression of reading a place and a person in under five seconds, and saving that information for future use. He moved in a distinctly measured way, as if he was constantly guarding against missteps. He usually stayed silent, which the other people in the office mistook for either shyness or stupidity. It was neither; his gambler’s mind just didn’t see the angle in yapping. Whenever he did talk, it either dripped with a strange blend of cynicism and wisdom or made you piss yourself laughing. Within two days of working there, he told me that the office – which really was a classical Panopticon – was set up so that the Big Boss could see you but you couldn’t see her, all the time. He developed an elaborate set of feints for accomplishing non-work activities literally under the table, or while kneeling down. You got the strange feeling that he was casing the joint.

Temp 3 (we’ll call him topspun): A white guy from Queens, definitely 22. Pretentious to a fault, he was fully assured that he could be doing anything other than standing vigil over a busted-ass copier. He treated the job as if he was doing the firm a favor by even showing up to lend his significant education in Kierkegaard and modernist poetics. He once cited Sartre in response to Tasha’s relationship problems, something about love being the need to control the other’s freedom as a freedom. It’s quite probable that everyone thought he was an asshole.

Tracy: Tracy was a black guy from Manhattan, maybe 28, who worked at the firm full time. He was hilarious, and a total grifter. We would often have to go to the basement file room on some invented errand, which would be an excuse for us to smoke cigarettes for half an hour and shoot the shit about sports. He discovered that I was a hockey fan (Rangers, of course), so he invented a long-standing love for the Pittsburgh Penguins and needled me about a player he called Yayromeeeeeeeer Yayger. Tracy hit on Tasha pretty much non-stop, and would ask her twenty times a day where her boyfriend was. “Hey Tasha. How you doin’? Where’s Donell at?” he’d say when he walked in every morning, ten minutes late, winking at me and Adward. “Hey,” he’d say after lunch, “You get that beep yet, cuz Donell might be out and around, you know?” Smiling at us. You don’t need to worry bout Donell, Tasha would say. “Nah, I ain’t worried. Donell seem busy and doin alright.” All day, back and forth, about that speed.

Ruby: An Indian woman from Guyana, maybe 40. She was the manager of our little ripping, collating, stapling, folding, stuffing and stamping outfit, and she was pretty well assured that each of us was far too fucking stupid to understand the complexities of any one of these operations, much less their graceful and elegant combination into what she thought was a process. She struggled against her almost overwhelming urge to treat us like a pack of drooling morons, usually covering over her disdain and condescension with a wan smile and deeply uncomfortable small talk. She also had a cringing fear of the Big Boss, who had managed to cow her within an millimeter of total abjection some time in the distant past.

Annette: The Big Boss. Yes, big. She was a completely round woman, maybe 4 foot 8, implausibly round like a circle drawn perfectly by hand. She was an Italian from Brooklyn who had started off as the founder of the firm’s secretary 25 years before, when it was a very small operation indeed. She’d then made the inevitable ascent to office manager and then operations manager, largely behind her tyrannical personality. Some of the impeccably educated full-timers noted bitterly that she’d never been to college. I saw her make at least three of these people cry in the eight weeks I was there. Since I had about as much interest in the job as your average person would have in framing a used burrito wrapper, I regarded her as an amusing caricature, which she seemed to recognize and maybe even admired. She never said one word to me the whole time I worked there.

So, one afternoon we were all busy on the stapling portion of the work, since we had printed, ripped, and collated for the day. The air was heavy with paper dust from our ripping, and we all sat around the big table in our room, flicking off eight pages and stapling, flick and staple and flip, flick and staple and flip, flick and staple flip. You’d be amazed by the depth of conversation you can get into while doing something like this, and how automatic it all becomes. We were efficient machines, but our machines were the problem. You see, a hand stapler isn’t really built for this level of repetitive activity; it is an occasional worker, fit for maybe fifty consecutive staples at most, which you don’t notice when you only staple three or four documents at a time. Staplers jam. They just do. On this particular afternoon, Adward’s stapler was jamming quite a bit, and this was causing a problem, both because it slowed things down, and because if the staple jams into the report, you may need to print a new one if you don’t remove the staple cleanly, etc. And you know what printing a new report would have entailed. “Damn,” he said – unusually prolix for him – when it jammed again.

I looked up to see that Ruby had now noticed; we all looked up, like gazelles sensing the lioness stalking the high grass. We knew we were in for a discourse on stapling methodology. “Eh, Adward?” Ruby said. She talked in questions. “Try this?” Tracy had a broad smile on his down turned face, which he was doing his best to prevent from transforming into a full-out laugh. He flicked and stapled furiously, perhaps thinking the ruffle and click could cover over what was fast becoming a giggle. Tasha checked her beeper, amused. I was sitting directly next to Adward, so I was figuring ways to remain uninvolved. But here she came, rounding the table from her position on the other side, and stood between Adward and me. “Every thirty staples or so? You open the stapler? You know how to open?” She grabbed the stapler from Adward, who placed his hands beneath his chin as if praying for escape. “And you take the staples out and flip them around?” She removed the connected staple cartridge and turned it the other way, then reinserted it into the slot and closed the stapler. “And this stops the stapler jamming?” Ruby placed the stapler back in front of Adward and said, like somebody who had given this lesson a thousand times, “Okay?” Adward grunted. Tracy ran out of the room, slurring something about the basement. Tasha looked at Ruby like she wanted to drop-kick her. “Everybody? Try it? Okay? I have to get coffee?” Ruby left the room.

Flick and staple and flip, flick and staple and flip, flick and staple flip. Needless to say, Ruby’s solution to stapler jams was laughable, and I defy anybody with any knowledge of engineering, repetitive action, or physics to explain to me how it would supposedly work. We all labored with that thought silently for almost ten minutes. And then Adward said something I don’t think I’ll ever forget, something I still repeat whenever somebody develops some outlandish solution and delivers it with such utter certainty and condescension. All the sarcasm in the world got compressed, ripped, collated, stapled, flipped, folded, stuffed and mailed out in his words. Casually looking over his shoulder towards the door, he drawled and dead-panned at once:

She must be a goddamn genius.

We were still laughing five minutes later when she returned. I never really quit that job. I just called the temp agency one Monday and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. The woman at the agency was really upset, since the firm had apparently started speaking to her about hiring me full time, a revelation so absurd that it simply floored me. They hired Tasha instead. I spoke with Tracy one more time after that, when the Penguins got knocked out of the playoffs. He didn’t care, as I knew he wouldn’t, but he gossiped with me for twenty minutes on the phone.

Ruby’s still doing her thing, I suspect. There are a lot of Ruby’s in my current profession, and I suppose in all professions. They provide their sparkling advice on listservs and in journal articles and book reviews. They do society the service of mistaking the utterly banal and ridiculous for the happy brilliance of invention, a service precisely because we are so short on real invention. They wear little nametags, and sip tea in conference center lobbies, handing out their hard-earned learning in healthy dollops. They mentor the Adwards and Tashas and topspuns of the world with remarkable diligence, though they despise them. They form groups and congratulate each other about their staple technique. They quiver in fear of Annette. Yes, a lot of Ruby’s everywhere, I guess. Lots of goddamn geniuses.

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