Zemblan Grammar

My temp job is painfully easy, in the a-monkey-could-do-it sort of vein. Nevertheless, I often find it completely exhausting, and I think this is due to the fact that, at these sorts of jobs, I am always struggling to make small talk and seem pleasant around people with whom I have very little in common.

Our office is, in itself, quiet as a stone, but when people are in it, doing their work-like tasks, it fills up with all sorts of human noise. People are forever on the phone, making deals, having meetings, talking to their neighbors, hanging out at other people’s cubes, and just generally interacting in vocal ways. Not that this is anything unusual, but I mention it because, since the office itself is so quiet, we can hear literally everything everyone else says. I know about my neighbors’ health problems (urinary incontinence! sleep apnea!) because I’ve heard them on the phone with their doctors; I know whose wives and daughters are pregnant and when they’re due; I know who goes to church (hint: almost everyone) and who doesn’t (hint: me); and I know some really scandalous and verrrry interesting information about one lady’s daughter who is in violation of her parole and on the run from the law. But it’s all so wearying. I really don’t want to know these things.

This sort of enhanced transparency (if indeed “transparency” can be applied to the auditory field) makes me stress all the more about the random conversations I have with people. In all honesty (and this should come as no surprise), I’d rather just be left alone to work in peace. What winds up happening, though, is that people toss their little conversational gambits my way and I have to volley back something that’s sufficiently friendly but also fairly benign. It’s a damn minefield: if you wind up praising the homemade cookies someone brought in, you risk freaking out a volatile dieter who’ll wind up on some tear about how the cookies weren’t supposed to be put on the filing table because they were supposed to be in the kitchen because they are too tempting and good lord she shouldn’t have to face walking by them twenty times a day, does no one listen. On the other hand, you may wind up having some very nice conversations when some one asks you for the zillionth time what you study, and then when you say literature, they wind up quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende and talking about the emergence of Latin American fiction in the American mainstream. So it’s a crap shoot, I guess.

They’re all just so chatty; I’d probably love hanging around with them when I am tipsy and all yakety-yakety, but since they don’t stock the kitchen with booze, it seems unlikely that will ever happen. I do have very strong opinions about one office subject, though: pens. I like a 0.5 mm ball point, but here, as in many other areas, I am in the minority. Rather than try to persuade them to see the fine-tipped light, I suppose I will continue trying to get things done while attempting to feign interest in Local College Sports Rivalries.

This has all been a preamble to the discussion of work yesterday, which was awesome. There were only three of us there, so it was dead quiet, plus I got bonus points for coming in when I could have stayed home. We finished the huge, stressful floor-plan project ahead of schedule, which really relieved my immediate supervisor, who had been wringing her hands about it for weeks. Her boss had been putting the pressure on, too, so she was pretty ecstatic to see it finally wrapped up, and she took my supervisor and me out to lunch as a thank you. I was happy to be recognized, you’d better believe. Half the time I feel like I am toiling away while a good portion of the manager’s don’t know my name or what I am doing in their office. Honestly, I can’t blame them: it is just a temp job, after all, and it’s not like I am going to be there for very long. That all just makes it nicer, though, when someone’s happy about what I’ve done.

Seriously, though: the highlight of yesterday had to be the absence of the existentially crushing stream of mindless chatter. One whole entire day where I wasn’t silently screaming to myself for them to shutthefuckup already–oh the sweet, sweet relief.