Unemployment sucks, but some days working as a Temp isn't much better. This kind of hard-earned wisdom you would expect to come from a gristled veteran with years of experience.
In my case, it took a half-day.
While I'm looking for a permanent position in DC, the necessities of rent payments and the excesses of boredom have led me to pursue a variety of temporary employment strategies, including various Craigslist odds and ends, and no fewer than 3 different temp agencies. However, summer in DC is not the best season for temping. Much like New York, DC is a mecca for ambitious college students looking to supplement their shiny resumes with internship experience. But very unlike New York, DC barely has enough workload to keep all these idle hands busy, with the end result being that temp work dries up in the summer heat like a Saharan kiddie-pool. So after more than a month of constant calling, I had yet to receive a single work assignment.
This all changed Thursday evening, when my friendliest agency called to alert me to a one-day job doing simple data entry for a private practice lawyer they work with regularly. I was to show up for work at 10 am on Friday, dress professionally, and work until the project was completed. My employer, I was assured, was a very nice "older gentleman" who, for the remainder of this post, will go by the pseudonym Mr. Bird.
And so, on the following morning, I got properly cleaned up, made the standard Metro commute, and arrived at the designated suite in the appropriate large generic office building promptly at 9:55 am. The door was locked, but this is not entirely uncommon, and I rang the "doorbell" to get buzzed in. To no avail.
By 10:10, still standing in the hall with my messenger satchel and lunch in a plastic bag, I was beginning to worry. Out in the lobby - I could hear because of the open atrium - I heard what seemed to be an irate mid-30s African-American woman come bustling in and screaming at the security guard. Luckily, I was saved from further awkwardness by the arrival of Mr. Bird, who came out of the elevator looking slightly flustered and tried to simultaneously close his dilapidated umbrella and get the office door unlocked. He was only partially successful.
Apparently, at least at this DC law firm, Friday is synonymous with vacation. None of the three secretaries were in attendance, leaving only their sweaters wrapped around the back of their well-stuffed office chairs to greet incoming visitors. In the entire office, which must have regularly housed a dozen lawyers, only 2 other middle-aged men in suits roamed from room to room. There was a repetitive beep sounding from a back corner that echoed through the entire place - apparently they had set off the office alarm, and lacking secretaries, had no idea how to deactivate it.
Mr. Bird led me back to his office in the corner, and asked me to sit down while he booted up his computer and checked e-mail. My first clue that this was going to be a rabbit-hole kind of day was not the ghost-town office or the chirping alarm, but the crackle and tone of my childhood that Mr. Bird's computer made as he logged on to read his e-mail: it was a dial-up modem.
I sat and watched Mr. Bird check his e-mail and write a few quick responses with the chirping alarm in the background the tick-tock of his ornate antique wooden clock, carved to look like a medieval castle, sitting on the end table beside me. Turning to me, the kindly older gentleman (somewhere between a well-worn 60 and a spry 75) was continually distracted by his still-uncooperative umbrella. It had seen better days. He had taken it home on Thursday when sudden thunderstorms rocked downtown DC, and was now returning it - dry, but for some reason open - back to its regular office cubbyhole. The top was tattered, but the real problem was the closing latch - it just wouldn't hold. After several minutes of unsuccessfully trying to explain my duties to me while fidgeting with the umbrella, he trailed off and devoted his full attention to the thing. "I really should replace it," he mumbled, and kept stabbing at it to secure the latch. Taking note of the awkwardness at hand, he commented, "I'm always here for the entertainment of others." Once finally successful, he proudly and carefully put it away into the patent-leather umbrella case he kept in his desk, the kind that I'd seen among my own lawyer-father's possessions, but which I assume haven't been sold in the Western hemisphere for several decades.
My job was to transcribe his handwritten notes regarding what billable hours he attributed to which clients and input them into his computer billing program, which would then generate reports and invoices. He had 2 months of back-log, called the temp agency whenever he needed to catch up. This was, by far, the most straightforward aspect of the entire day.
After proving to Mr. Bird that I could operate the computer and be relied upon to put the proper account and number of hours (between 0.1 and 1.3, usually) in the correct box, I was left to myself, sitting at Mr. Bird's desk in the vintage 1980s moon chair the he preferred, entering dates, clients and hour decimals on his computer. I received my first startle at 11:00, when the tick-tock/ alarm chirp symphony (still hadn't resolved that issue) was joined by a sudden and rapturous "Koo-Koo, Koo-Koo, Koo-Koo." The clock behind me, having sprung to life behind my back, slowly closed its little tower doors, drawing the carved wooden birds back into their dens.
Shortly thereafter, or about 2 days worth of time logging later, I heard a gruff young police officer ordering people around in the main office lobby. I assumed he was (finally) responding the incessant alarm, but in that assumption I was incorrect. I missed most of the opening words, but the sound of Mr. Bird pleading with the officer, "I feared for my life! That person was trying to run me down. She was going to run me over!" caught my attention.
"Mr. Bird," the officer countered, "after the car stopped, was the window already broken, or did that happen later?"
Whenever Mr. Bird would relapse into his tale of woe, his life flashing before his eyes, etc., the officer would, with increasing forcefulness, interrupt - "Mr. Bird, after the car stopped, was the window already broken? Was it broken, or not?"
The plaintiveness in Mr. Bird's voice was unmistakable, and between each of my key strokes I could hear the cop getting even more assertive.
"We're going downtown Mr. Bird. I'm putting you in handcuffs. You are under arrest for destruction of property."
Mr. Bird waddled back into his office, and I was thankful that the computer screen faced away from the door. "Like I said," he whimpered by way of embarrassed apology, "I'm always here for the entertainment of others." He picked up the phone and placed a call - to his lawyer.
While Mr. Bird was in with me, I could hear the two younger lawyers trying to talk down the police officer. "Isn't there some other way we can resolve this?" "I'm sure Mr. Bird wouldn't do a thing like that." "Perhaps there's someone at your precinct we could call first."
After some surprisingly lucid banter - "Hello Robert, it's been too long. I thought about stopping by your office for lunch the other week - oh what's that, you've moved offices? Well, you really should send an update to your clients, you know..." - Mr. Bird put his lawyer on hold, and went back to the lobby. There, he told the officer, "I have my lawyer on the line and he'd like to speak with you."
"Oh," the officer backed off, "I have nothing to say to him." Then in a return to form, "it doesn't matter what your lawyer says, this is happening."
If I had been on a sitcom, this is probably when the camera would have flashed to a webcam shot of me cringing my shoulders and mouthing the words, "oh, snap!" Instead, I just kept typing with the kind of focus necessary to ignore a black hole swirling into existence in the next room.
Eventually, the other lawyers were able to convince the officer that the best solution would be for Mr. Bird to speak with the irate woman, and for them to work out a solution directly - by which it was implicit that Mr. Bird would pay for her window repair - in cash - and she in return would drop charges against him. This didn't sit well with Mr. Bird, who felt he was the one owed an apology, but neither did the prospect of handcuffs.
Before going downstairs, the police officer added, "Mr. Bird, make sure to have your things. If she agrees, you will need to go directly to an ATM, withdraw money, and pay her in my presence. If she insists on pressing charges, I will have to book you and take you directly downtown."
A minute later, I was alone in the office with the tick-tock of the clock and the beeping alarm.
Based on the accusations of the police officer, who got his story from the woman driving the car, and the skewed perspective of *the assailant* Mr. Bird, here is what I was able to reconstruct had occurred:
On his way to work that Friday morning, Mr. Bird was carrying his little umbrella, returning it to the office after use the previous afternoon. While crossing the street - and there is every indication this was during a designated "walk" signal - a large SUV either ran the light, or attempted to out-run a yellow. In either event, the driver saw Mr. Bird at the last moment and slammed on her brakes, creating a loud squeal of the tires, and narrowly stopping before slamming its grill into Mr. Birds hip. At first in utter shock and terror, Mr. Bird quickly transitioned to anger, especially as the driver not only did not apologize, but quickly cranked her steering wheel and tried to veer around the elder citizen and speed off. In what was admittedly a dark moment, Mr. Bird lashed out at the car with whatever he had at hand - his sad, dinky, decade-old umbrella.
And there the story would have probably ended - an old man gets scared and angry, eventually flailing at a passing SUV to no effect - had it not been that the SUV's rear driver window was partially - but not entirely - rolled down. The increased fragility of the glass in that position allowed Mr. Birds otherwise unimposing tool to become an object of considerable destruction, and the window shattered as it passed him. Though Mr. Bird formally maintained his ignorance of this part of the story, it's hard not to imagine him taking a slight feeling of justice at this turn after the scare he had just suffered, and continued to his office flustered and a few minutes late.
But the driver, once the glass was shattered, did not continue on her merry way. Now irate herself, she must have turned around and followed Mr. Bird the block or so further to his office building, then parked the car in the street to follow him into the building and demand that the security guard on duty call the cops. The story, as she related it to the responding police officers, was surely one about a too-rich-to-car professional type who smashed in her window for no good reason. And the icing on the cake - her baby was buckled into the back seat on the opposite side from the broken glass, making this a child-endangering offense.
What exactly happened when Mr. Bird went downstairs - whether he paid in cash or took a ride downtown - was not known to me. I was left alone, with no word about what was happening or whether or not my "boss-for-the-day" would be returning to the office or spending the night in lock-up for bashing in a window in a baby's face (exaggerated).
One and a half hours passed, and I was able to complete all of June and most of July. The alarm was finally silenced, and the clock kept ticking.
Mr. Bird strolled into the office, almost as if nothing had happened, and asked if I was ready for my lunch break. I said that I only had a little further to go, and he corrected himself - he needed to check his e-mails, and wanted me off his computer, so now would be a good time for my lunch break.
I ate my two nutella and blueberry jelly sandwiches in the staff kitchen and jotted down notes from the morning's encounter. Mr. Bird closed his door for 20 minutes, depriving me of a greater insight into events that were already far more public than was any of my business. I returned to entering data, and Mr. Bird proofread my entries, noting (though not connecting the cause of) an especially high number of typos in a particular range of my work. I apologized and made the edits.
Once the work was done, Mr. Bird signed my time card, and I walked it over to my temp agency, just 2 blocks away. It was Friday, and meager as it would be, I wanted some financial reward from this day of anxiety as quickly as possible.
My agent took my card, and asked me how everything went.
"Fine," I said.
"Yeah," she responded, as I turned to go, "That Mr. Bird is such a nice gentleman."
Weber
::lame(Texpatriot)
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