The Temp: Chapter 1

Temporary Irritations

Twiggy is back helping Supervisor wipe the Executive sales guys' a*ses. Ever since Adminzilla got the ax, Supervisor's been busy wiping them all by her lonesome. It's been a long 4 months of wiping Executive a** for Supervisor. She used to be so cheerful, then the solitary Wiping wore on and on and she began to get all crabby. Crabby for Supervisor is what others would call nice, though. Crabby for her means she's not that welcoming when you stop by her cube just to chit chat. Napoleon finally let her get a temp so Twiggy could go back there and help her out.

Soooooooo now we have this super-perky, over-qualified temp whom we'll call Nitpicker. Say hello to Nitpicker everyone. I have a reason for this nickname.

Nitpicker is 'smart about computers' too. In fact, just yesterday, I had her do some data entry work for me, since she was bored to tears, and she told me how a certain button in my Access database shouldn't be a tabstop and I should fix that.

"I used to design Access databases too, and I just had to have everything I did be super, super user-friendly." Well yippidy skippidy for you. This is your second day and you're pointing out how I can do stuff better. Perfect. She's definitely much nicer than me. I keep it user-friendly to a certain extent. But I'm not going to retardize my work so people who are too stupid to own a computer can use it. They'd probably find a way to f*ck it up.

Guess what position she applied for? The Executive A**wiper position. She asked me yesterday what I thought her chances were. I was honest.

"It's very hard to tell." After all, they hired that psycho, didn't they? "We've had a lot of perfectly acceptable candidates so far but no dice. It's really all about personality." And Napoleon would, I'm sure, soon want you dead. You're too helpful.

Now, I do have to give her credit. She's less irritating than Twiggy. She tells me when she's leaving her cubicle so I can be aware that I should be answering the d*mn phone. And she is easier to give direction to. So that's nice.

But there's something there that I can't put my finger on that irritates me about her. I can't imagine what it would be like having her in the Executive A**wiper position. She might, just might, turn into an Adminzilla, but to a lesser degree. Adminzilla had way more chutzpah than Nitpicker.

It defnitely is fun to watch her answer those irritating phone calls and be so helpful. But every day, the helpfulness degrades just a little bit. She's now to the point where she's saying things like this: "It's so funny how people don't get that it's not Bank of America when I answer the phone ABC Nuts & Bolts. It's so FUNNY. Hello! The two just don't sound anything alike. I've always taught my kids…blah blah blah. And then there was the Geico caller that told me he wanted a picture of his car…blah blah blah." You get the picture. Twiggy and I got over the idiocy that is dealing with the public long ago. Nitpicker will too. Every day, Nitpicker gets a little less helpful. So far, she's cheerfully giving Geico and People callers the right phone number, whereas I hang up on them the second after I tell them wrong number. I'm not wasting my time on giving wrong number callers the right number…I'm wasting it by writing in my blog, which is far more productive, in that it produces something. :o)