workingfortheman.com

You know when you move, and you write in your new address on your credit card payment stub? Well, some lowly peons have to decipher your handwriting and type the new info into the system. And for the last five weeks, I have been one of those lowly peons.

Every day, thousands of these COAs (change of addresses) flow into the offices of the credit card company where I am temping. Me and my four fellow COA operatives/temps sit in our cubicles and tackle as many bundles of 50 as we can.

At least that's what we did during the first few hours on the first day.

Now we simply give the appearance that we are working feverishly to take a bite out of the enormous, ever-growing pile of coffee stained, wrinkled COAs. We stare intently at our computer screens, but what we're really doing is having conversations with each other. Of course, if someone is telling a really good story, we all stand up and peer over the cubicle walls to watch the spinster weave his tale. But everyone keeps an eye out for senior management. And if someone sees one of the bosses walking towards us, he whispers "shark," and everyone sits back down and pretends to be immersed in their bundles of COAs.

This is not to say that our detection system is foolproof. The other day, while I was up getting a hot cup of tea, Short Cake, Al, Chachi, and Mr. C (We all gave ourselves nicknames based on characters from Happy Days in response to having to put up name tags in our cubicles) were having a good laugh about a rather random joke. At the moment I spilled hot tea on my hand and screamed, "FUCK," and Chachi was mockingly telling everyone to get back to work, the boss of bosses happened to come around the corner to find everyone blatantly goofing off.

He did the usual thing the boss of bosses does in moments like these. He just stood there and stared. And stared. And stared. And finally, he asked in that "I caught you guys fooling around and now I get to talk to you like you are all little fools that I could toss right on out of here if I wanted because I'm the big, fat, golf aficionado BOSS" tone of voice: "You gentlemen have work to do?"

And then Short Cake, in what I at first thought was an unthinkable response, said, "No." But before the big, red faced fat one in dockers could say anything, Short Cake snuck in with this little, "can't touch me now" statement: "Do you have something that needs to be done?"

The big boss was dumbstruck. Short Cake was able to go in for the kill by adding this final zinger: "We're all working on COAs, but if you've got something that needs to be done, we can do it."

The boss of bosses knew he was had, but the haughtiness at his core allowed him to recover. He quickly explained that we should continue with the COAs and then walked away. Most likely he was able to convince himself that he had made his point and gotten us to work harder. But we all knew that we had slam dunked his ass. We celebrated by doing even less work than usual. It was a triumphant moment, a victory for all temps everywhere.

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