if I'm supposed to do something different, someone better tell me quick!

It was six summers ago that I sat in the fourth floor of one of Kansas' few highrise buildings waiting for nothing to do and nothing to be done. I was hired to enter data into computers. Out of the entire keyboard, we used eleven buttons. I listened to women talk about their homes with an emphasis on their driveways, because that's where they parked their cars to drive their kids to various activities. My boss spent his days seriously looking at websites about hunting dogs. At first, I did come to work to put in an honest eight hours of data entry. But in time the work was finished and we, as workers, got to experience firsthand a state budget surplus. There were sixteen temp employees like me and not a thing to do except clock in to recieve state money. I read several books that my mom had given me in the past, slept on the job, took two hour lunch breaks, and then quit this supposed luxury of a job to make fifty cents more on the hour gardening. At this point in my life, I exposed the busy bee side of myself. If you wanted to insult me, you could call me a drone.

My job now has me doing little. Everyone went to LA this week and they left me in the office. Sometimes someone calls in with a technical problem and it's my job to be cordial over the phone and then to call the technical support and get the problem resolved.

Why couldn't they just call the technical support themselves, you ask.

I am a replacement salesperson this week, that's the reason. This office is just salespeople who agree on a price with a client (as much as they can get) and then continue to be the customer service person for the length of the contract. It's no small feat, because the system is not very user-friendly and has enough bugs to merit a Microsoft logo. Also, these record company types want all kinds of information that in some way shows how great a job they did.

At the end of this week, I'll know the product and what customers want to use with it. This will enable me to sell it to new customers and thus get a real job. Unlike Carnegie, who was a hard worker, I may succeed in getting a job by sitting around and not making too much noise or flatulence.

My cubical foursome consists of other kids my age. They talk about TV, restaurants, their universities and their drinking societies, and anything where the guy across from me can start going, "I know, oh yeah, I know. And let me tell you..." Two of them form the young avant-garde who takes care of Rush Limbaugh and his team's travelling schedule, clearing the way as that helplessly honest man pounds through radio interviews with more sound effects than could be found In Another Galaxy Far, Far Away... They may progress to become talk-radio salespeople themselves. The young man across from me, a guy who seems to know what I or anyone needs to do in any given situation, is currently crumpling up papers and doodling around on his PC. He and the shockingly attractive sales rep from Winston-Salem get to go to California next week for a sales conference. Are you going? they asked. No, no, I work with the music tracking service, not talk radio, I said. As if I would have been flown out to LA for anything.

Who cares, I hear that LA smells anyways and that the traffic is awful.

Like every job I've had, the other employees will be here longer than I will. No threat of sustained unemployment or even worse, unemployability, has convinced me to weather out a job and learn how to be a real team-player. In addition, no prospect of a better job or higher pay has ever seemed that attractive to me. The raises that jobs have proposed me in the past would seem appealing to someone who runs over to the corner of a closet because they saw several pennies there. That thirty cent raise adds up, you say? Maybe enough to cover a quarter of my Fantasy Deficit which already has me buying myself into fashion, a car, a nice apartment, and broadway plays.

As I've been a little ill this week, I have had no problem living the quiet life. In the hope that I could connect my illness to the 9 hours I've spent on dating websites, I put this sentence in between the next sentence and the sentence previous to it. So, against my stated position of remaining off dating websites for five years, I emerged on the internet as a new, self-described me.

The first site is not really my fault. I was reading the German national paper, Die Welt, when I saw the words "Partner search" in German. Now, my German may not be able to explain how I want my steak cooked, or for what reasons I have for studying German, but I saw that word and clicked on it. Instead of being able to peruse 20 or so faces before the service would cut me off to ask for money, like it's done in the US, they instantly invited me to go a little deeper into the website to take a test. That test took three hours. There was Gestalt testing, situational reaction testing, it was very thorough. I was wasted by the time I finished it, but when I saw that me and number 66 from Switzerland were a good match, I felt welcome to my new life in their popular democracy. Needless to say, in order to get more than an id number and a vague description, I had to start shelling out money. And so my interest dropped accordingly. I feel bad for those German-speaking women. They're probably not looking for a post-Clintonic American to invade their email boxes. I'll spare them by refusing to pay the site's high fees.

Later this week a friend of mine referred me to www.okcupid.com, a free site. This prevented me from backing out, as it was free. So I went whole hog, and now I'm on the site. The pictures of the girls who live near me confirm my haunting realization: New York has alot of ugly women. There's a reason why the Beach Boys sang about a "midwest farmer's daughter" and not a "landlord's precious dahling", the Beach Boys weren't going anywhere near here to include her in their spectrum of California Girls.

This weekend will see the arrival of relatives and friends, as will the week after that, and the week after that. Who knows, you'd better check the website for some pictures, they could be good!

posted by Wellsmus @ 3:46 PM