Jobs I've Had Part VI: The Temp

In the fall of 1996, I decided to apply to work with a temp agency. I was only going to take one course at night that semester, and I wanted a job that I could quit or take a sabbatical on when I returned to school full time at some point. I worked with Randstad, which placed me in a variety of clerical positions. I only recall three of the many jobs that I worked in during those six months.

Columbia HCA

In the 1990's Columbia was probably the largest private for-profit hospital corporation in the country. I worked for several weeks at their consulting division, which would be retained by medical practices to analyze their business model and find ways to save money or function better. They would spend months producing one massive bound volume that contained their recommendations, and I was brought in to help with the process of preparing and finalizing that physical document. I remember next to nothing about it.

Talquin Electric Cooperative

I was sent to a small electric company outside Tallahassee called Talquin Electric Cooperative. It serviced the small towns outside the suburbs of the city, many of which were lower income. I originally was just the receptionist, answering the telephones and signing in people who were there to see one of the account managers. The customers who came into the office looked like an audience of Springer, and it was heartbreaking to see so many people drive all the way to the electric company to make a scrounged-together $20 payment and beg them not to shut off their power.

Overwhelmingly most of the calls I answered were people wanting to either try to make payment arrangements or to find out why their power had been shut off, and after a few weeks the account managers started letting me look at their accounts in the computer system and talk to them about their payment issues. It took a load off the account managers and prevented callers from staying on hold so long, but as a result I got yelled at at least 3 or 4 times a day by some irate person whose power had been shut off during a hot Tallahassee day.

I think I worked at Talquin for about 2 months before they hired a permanent receptionist, a very sweet but slightly dumb girl who I trained to replace me.

The Department of Transportation Office of the General Counsel

I was sent to be a legal secretary for two litigation attorneys in the State of Florida's Department of Transportation. I opened their mail, drafted their documents from dictation, handled their filing, and did other various administrative tasks. The FLDOT had a variety of types of cases, everything from recovering for property damage when a drunk driver took out a guardrail to a slip and fall at a rest stop.

The majority of the cases that I recall working on involved the train lines that ran through South Florida. The only cases that I remember involved two different sets of teenaged boys that died when they were hit by trains on the same stretch of track in West Palm Beach. The train tracks ran over a trestle, which was essentially a bridge over a canal that was only about a foot wider on each side than the tracks themselves. This particular trestle was a popular place to go fishing, but because trains came around a curve about 100 yards down the track, people fishing on the tracks did not get much warning. In the first case, two children had been sitting on the tracks when the train approached and had gotten up and started running but did not make it to the other side of the trestle. In the second case, a man had taken his child and a friend of the child fishing at that same location, and had told them about the first case as a way to make them be vigilant at all times to watch for approaching trains. He had also told the boys there were alligators in the canal, ostensibly also so that they would be careful to watch for a train. When a train did approach, the two boys were so scared about the alligators that they did not jump off the trestle, even as the father screamed at them to jump. I can recall receiving an envelope addressed to one of the FLDOT attorneys in the case, and opening it to find it contained the autopsy photos of the two boys who had been hit. I felt absolutely sick to my stomach for the rest of the day as a result.

I worked at the FLDOT for several months and became very good friends with the attorneys I worked with. They knew I wanted to go to law school, and one of them eventually wrote me a recommendation letter when I left to go back to school full time for spring semester.

I expected to hate temping, and sometimes it was very awkward to show up at a place where nobody had an incentive to get to know you because they presumed you would be gone in a few days. There was also a persistent belief that temps were usually incompetent, so I was frequently told that it was surprising I could figure out how to do someone's job while they were out. It was insulting to have people treat me as though they expected me to be a moron, even if they later ended up pleasantly surprised when I was not. But temping paid my bills, and it gave me my first bit of legal experience that inspired me to go back and finish my BA and get to law school. One of the attorneys I worked for had gone to BU Law, and he was a big part of the reason I decided to apply there. As luck would have it, I got a pretty sweet scholarship from them so I should probably have thanked him.


Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!