“I could go on. Here’s three.

Temped in a textbook publisher’s marketing department, entering data to send out book samples to sales prospects, then I replace the supervisor, who goes out on maternity. They tell me she’s probably not coming back and nobody can train me. So I figure 75% of it out by myself and even write up procedures for the other temps they have doing the data entry work, so as to save on training time. Then I discover the product sampling process they use is years out of date, sending sample books to people who don’t want them and keeping them from the ones who do. I decide it needs fixing now and not only save them thousands of dollars a year in costs but probably make them several times that in new sales orders. Then the field sales reps I’m supplying realize that unlike my slacker predecessor, I stay late to make sure they always get samples to send their last-minute, narrowâ€window-of-opportunity prospects, instead of flipping them the bird and going home at 4:45. I’m a hero instantly, they’ve never been treated like human beings before, they go nuts, even the warehouse likes me. Jeez, maybe the company might not only hire me but pay me a decent wage, right?

New boss comes in and replaces the old one who had promised me a future there. For a week or two she’s nice enough. Then the afternoon she reads my resume, which includes an unavoidable indication of my non-mainstream religion, she flips from Jekyll to Hyde. She’s obviously something more traditional, because I become a leper overnight. She’s now hunting down every opportunity to find me doing something wrong, except I’ve been doing it much better than her buddy my predecessor, which pisses her off even more. She tries to ambush me in my office and catch me off guard with no use for any pleasantries like hello or see you. One day she pokes her head in my office for an ambush. “Did you finish this?”, she demands. “Er, yes, I did.” “What about that?!” “Uh, yes.” “Well what about that?” “Um, well, yes, I did that three days ago. We’re even trying to get ahead on the next task.” Icicles of disappointment begin forming off the doorjamb, and she turns and stomps off in a fury. My coworkers had gathered she’d taken a new turn on me, but some of them are still stunned. One of them waits to make sure she’s gone, then peers inside to see if I’m still alive. “I couldn’t believe that, and I was standing here and heard the whole thing! She was rude, she was abrasive, she was insulting…” A second person says, “Was that really J_____?” A third tries to laugh, “Face it, C____, she *really* doesn’t like you!” A fourth coworker, however (of my boss’s religious persuasion it seemed), goes into denial any of this happened, because the coworker had watched me staying thanklessly night after night later than even she did and commiserate, “C____, all your hard work will be rewarded, I promise!” Heh, it sure did. The boss brought back my predecessor, every job there I applied to afterward went nowhere, and back I went into temp land. And I’ve seen more than one temp made the scapegoat for some the incompetence of a regular employee.

Or the legal department of the big mutual fund company. Because of a former job, I know their obscure software better than any of them do, and I’m a top-rate proofer. One day I clock in at 9:00 a.m. and stay till 10 or 11 p.m. on deadlined paralegal stuff for them, skipping dinner because the project is so important. Not only do I get no overtime or recognition, they don’t even have the grace to send out for a pizza. A different lawyer boss I get at the same company tells me to put something in the ___ file. An hour later she goes looking for it and chews me out because it turns out there are two files by that name, and she never told me about the obscure but identically labelled on. I’m stupid, this is unacceptable, etc. Of course I make the mistake, since lawyers love power above all things, of mentioning I want to help them do things right, but she never informed me the other file existed. An hour later my agency calls me and tells me “it looks like they won’t be needing you after today” (and work then got really scarce for a month or two). Actually, I was getting indispensible to the point of being tech support for the entire *floor*, but this woman lusted for the opportunity to fire somebody who (a) was male, (b) had gone to an Ivy League school, and (c) knew her for her true colors. Dunno, maybe it really was her profession: her coworker went ecstatic when she “made” two million dollars selling some bonds back to an Indian tribe they’d bought them from only half a year before. Put differently, they soaked a poverty-ridden reservation out of either meager savings or forced them to sell assets to pay the debt. But I’m not sure either of them had souls.

Temping, done rightly, can be good practice for becoming a Dalai Lama. My next boss at a new worksite had gone through five assistants before me in one week, the agency told me to just try it for a day and see how it went, I didn’t have to take it if I didn’t want. She was definitely a type A, but completely un-self-aware and for whom business ethics were silly suggestions, but surprise, she got herself canned for her apparently legendary conduct (though after blackmailing the company for a $40,000 parachute first, which she probably should have paid them instead), and I outlasted her about three years till I left. Now the firm did string me out for cheap first with 364 days’ worth (notice the legal maximum?) of “indecision” over plans for our department before hiring me. It didn’t stop the conniving woman who stole my job shortly after I finally got it either, but in spite of misrepresentations behind my back I documented my productivity daily and managed to get one slightly better.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had bosses who were positive saints, especially in scale with their superiors, who in one place compromised the organization’s core principles (that one’s a page by itself). I had to resign from that one to keep my integrity, in spite of the fact it probably cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in income in the long run, which I could sure have used and still could, though I don’t regret it one minute. (That was how I got to be a temp when other people lost their souls and kept their jobs.) But some of them made my current boss, in the grand scheme look tame. True, in spite of good points she sometimes loses stuff on her desk and then blames you all day long for losing it, or uses an interrogatory tone of voice when she’s demanding where her keys are, which is frequently (er, after two years of patient service you think I’m hiding them?) But even when you’ve been robbed, some of it looks relative.

Keep the faith; self-respect still counts for more than most people think.”