Attention Span is chemical.

Don't you think deconstructionists have some kind of motive other than boredom?

To attribute a thorough-going postmodernism to a surfeit of spare time seems a bit uncharitable.

David Vanderlaan, 2001

Recursive Distraction.

I might actually get a job for July.  This is amusing.  On the nifty little form at the temp agency you fill in the little boxes for the skills that you have.  I happened to check "HTML." So this lady from Friends & Co. (and the funny thing is, I really DO think of them as my friends) called me up and told me that there was a position involving computer skills.  She wanted to ascertain whether I had enough skills, however, she found this hard to do because she herself didn't know jack shit about computers. So it went something like this:

Friend: So, you do know HTML?

Me: Yes.

Friend: Well, it's very important for this job that you can do links.  Can you make it so that your HTML links to other HTMLs?

Me: Um, I suppose.  I'm not sure I understand--

Friend: Well, the guy said that links were important.  Do you think you can do links.

Me: I think I can probably handle links.

It went on like this for quite a bit.  She asked me many times if I had taken any classes or had any formal training.  Formal training is very important.  I could pay $500 to go to a class, sit in the back with swizzle sticks in my nose, drooling, and they'd think that was just groovy.  The words "self-taught" make them very nervous.  Oh well.  I have to go to an interview tomorrow (for a temp job?? yes.  go figure), and it'll probably turn out that the position requires a unix guru with a java chip grafted to his cerebral cortex.  In which case I'll have spent yet another day enjoying LONG HOURS IN THE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM OF THE WASHINGTON METROPOLITAN AREA.  I've been doing a lot of that.  Tomorrow I'll be taking Metro and then the VIRGINIA bus system to a place called "Leesburg."  This scares me.

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Yes, yes, yes, the bum of all summer bums now has a job.  This actually comes to me as bad news, since it starts Monday, which is when I'd been planning on cruising up to New York to chill with Phil and Dave.  Nevertheless, I sally forth, not this time into the maze of government temp contracts, but into the business world.  Which, from what I've learned so far, seems far, far more terrible.

I'm working, of course, for Friends & Co., who REALLY REALLY feel like friends, ya know?  They are hiring me out to a company called Tecom, which does computer consulting work and jive like that. 

But I won't technically be working for Tecom, though. No, no.  That would be too easy.  Tecom is hiring me out to a Bell Atlantic office.  At that Bell Atlantic office there are many, many customer service reps on many, many phones answering many, many questions.  And Bell Atlantic wants to have many, many computer screens in front of those many, many reps, showing many, many copies of Netscape.  Bell Atlantic wants all the information that the customer service reps need to know to be right there on their computer screens, in a nice, sensible maze of networked, html documents.

But that's not what I'm going in for.  Oh, no.  Team One has already been working at Bell Atlantic for awhile, writing these HTML documents.  I'm part of Team Two.  Team Two is going to go in there and review these HTML documents and decide how they can "flow" better.  "Flow" is very important in whatever it is I'm about to do. 

So, essentially, what it is, is, stepping forward boldly into the business world to cross the T's and dot the i's of a three-ring binder in cyberspace.

Ehh.  It's a living.  And hey, it's $12 an hour.  I can live with that.

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The project I'm working on over here at Bell Atlantic in the service of Trecom in the service of Friends & Co. (who, while certainly not friends in the sense that YOU are all friends, still give you that oh-so friendly feeling) is stalled yet again.  I dawdle.  I play Solitaire.  I appeal to Robbie, the lab manager, for Something To Do.  I get something that takes 15 minutes and stretch it out for an hour and a half or so.  I pull this off by a bit more creative dawdling, and by arguing with one of the other temp guy here who insists that we can be ONE HUNDRED PERCENT sure of how the West Saxon dialect of Old English was pronounced.  Anyway, now I'm done with all that, and still have two hours to kill.

That means an extraordinarily long letter of dubious worth.

Isn't the alt-tab in Windows great?  I can be sitting here, writing this, and if out of the corner of my eye I see Somebody in Charge approaching, it's just blipblip and there's the help page that I've already written and printed sitting right there in MS Word. I can make like I'm fixing spelling or something, although I've already done that three times.

This is what my desk is like.  It's six feet long or so--sort of an oversized cubicle-thing.  It's not really quite a cubicle, though--it's part of a row of desks and computers that are divided by divider-things.  There's a bulletin board with a big flowchart for "End-to-End Flow for Release 1.0," which isn't relevant at all to what I'm working on (help menus for Release 1.2).  Next to that is a sheet of paper with instructions about "How To Access The USRALRT.XLS file." I don't know what that is.

My backpack is sitting on my desk because there's room for it.  It has the empty bag I brought my lunch in, an old copy of Harper's that I keep forgetting to remove, my writing notebook, and a copy of the Tolkien Reader.  In the smaller pocket there are many pens, two bouncy balls, many pens, andat least one ocarina.

Next to my backpack is a big pile of papers.  Scattering papers all around the desk makes me seem very busy.  They gave us each our VERY OWN yellow legal pad and pad of JUMBO SIZED post-it notes when we got here.  Also, the head guy from Trecom showed up last week and gave us each Trecom pens and coffee mugs.  He was a yuppy of the slimy variety--the kind of guy who calls people "sport" and "guy" a lot and when you do something for him says "thank you, sir."  You'd think guys like that are mostly 40ish, but the scary thing is that this guy wasn't far past 30.  He was very proud of the fact that he was in charge of all us Trecom folks.  Larry, the Bell Atlantic guy who's in charge of this whole project, is also very proud of the fact that he's in charge.  On the first day he told us all that hard work would mean a "recommendation from me on your future job applications." He said that as if he were offering us manna.

Anyway, I have my very own phone.  The number is 703-974-8424, but things are crowded enough around here that I'm not very able to pull of long conversations without arousing attention, although I wish I could.  Still, anyone who wants to chat for 5 minutes or so is more than welcome.  Next to the phone are the pile of CDs I brought today.  For some reason I had an overwhelming desire to listen to Suzanna Vega (this is the second time I've had that desire this week, too).  So the pile consists of her 3 albums, plus the Until The End of The World soundtrack and something by Branford Marsalis (which is what I'm listening to now).  I listen to all of Phish last week.

Next to the CDs is my Trecom mug.  The coffee here is very, very bad.  I'm hoping I can avoid becoming caffeine-hooked, but it's looking like a cup in the morning is pretty much standard.  Next to that is my trusty travel alarm, which currently reads 2:52 pm.  That means I've been writing this for only 22 minutes, and that with occasional interruptions.  I don't think I'm going to be able to sustain this for an hour without breaking into improvisational blather.

This computer, as I've already mentioned, is very, very nice.  This place (the expressTRAK(tm) Business Lab) has its very own mousepads, two of which are nearby.  I'm in Workstation #8.  The CD-ROM uses those nifty removable CD trays like in Mission Impossible.  That Is All.

Bell Atlantic is a rather strange place right now.  They had a big strike a few months ago, and lots and lots of people lost their jobs.  Robbie, who works from Trecom and is in charge of us directly, used to work for Bell Atlantic.  Four of the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts (There are many acronyms in this place)) working in the lab are communting from far distances -- one from Richmond, one from Delaware, and two from Pittsburgh.  This all has to do with the job losses and stuff.  I think they're all a little fearful--whenever Larry is within earshot, you can hear them throwing in comments about how much they like their jobs and how glad they are to be working for Bell Atlantic.  Why, in the midst of this, they've decided to revamp their billing system and hire a small army of temps to do the legwork on the help menus is beyond me.  But I've been paid $6 for what I've written so far in this letter, which is probably more than I'll make for writing anything else in my life.

I just noticed that Kenny Kirkland is playing piano on this Branford album I'm listening to--he's the same guy that played with Sting when Branford did too on Dream of the Blue Turtles. Cool.

Hmm, well.  Now it's 3:34.  I finished that project and told Robbie I'd "prepare for tomorrow's meeting," something I've done quite a few times already.  Around four o'clock I'll wander down the row and chat with ONE HUNDRED PERCENT guy a little more.  I borrowed a Pearl Jam CD from one of the other temps -- this has increased my energy level considerably. Ho-hum.  Eric, one of the temps that was here before out batch, has just entered our row to inform us that he was going home. He then mentioned that, well, no, he was going to go run and lift before he went home.  I think that particular comment was directed at Jennifer, whom Eric has been directing plenty of comments at.  Ken has been directing comments at Courtney.  It's a wild, crazy world of interoffice politics and romance, let me tell you. Then there's the whole temp-SME relationship, since each of us is working with one of the SMEs.  Jennifer is working with Sandy, which is bad, because both of them are rather anal-retentive and disagree a lot.  My SME isn't Steve (fortunately (I'm not sure where Steve fits in (I don't think he does, really))), it's Gerry McLaughlin, who is just like what Mrs. Laughlin would be like if she, too, had a "Mc" in front of her last name.  "Gerry" is short for "Geraldine," I think.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure we're the most overqualified bunch of temps ever assembled.  Of the six of us, 4 have M.A.s, two are in Ph.D. programs.  One of the M.A. guys got his from Yale.  Ken's still in college, but he has that very smart and with-it look about him.  He looks and acts a lot like Rick Treur, if Rick were blond and also liked sports.  One of the guys is actually just graduated from high school, but then again, he's going to Harvard.  He's the guy I borrowed Pearl Jam from.

OK, enough of this nonsense.  I'm going to get a drink, try out some doors to important-looking places, and then bum around until 4:30.


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