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Message-ID: <1ex7qk4.154vscax09540N%jwgh@earthlink.net>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
Subject: Re: We interupt this program to bring you .........this!
From: "Jacob W. Haller" <jwgh at earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 16:56:09 -0400

Conmidhe <conmidhe at geek.com> wrote:

I have worked as a machinist , clerk and various other things even more mundane.

What's more mundane than a CLERK??? Tofu taste tester?

Assembly line is worse than clerk. At least clerks get to sit down occasionally.
[. . .]

My Job In Industry

  by, Jacob W. Haller1

During one of my extended absences from college, I did some temping. I went in to the temp agency and took all kind of aptitute tests. They showed that I was a fast typist and had good computer skills.

One of my first jobs was at an envelope factory. I would put paper in a machine, which would print something on it, apply glue, and fold it, forming envelopes with a return address on it.2

I worked at this job for about a week. The first day I spent a few hours putting reams of paper in the machine. Then the machine broke.

After a couple of hours hanging out doing nothing I was getting pretty bored, so I asked my supervisor if there was anything else I should be doing.

He looked around, a bit surprised, and said, "Well, I suppose you could sweep up a bit." He gave me a broom and dustpan. I proceeded to do some unenthusiastic sweeping up and vowed never to ask that question ever again at a temp job.

The next day I showed up and the machine was still broken, so I did nothing that day except hang out and read.

The next couple of days it was the same. Then that job ended.

The enb.3

Tune in next time for the next exciting episode, "My Job In Real Estate".4

-jwgh 

-- 
"Thought abhors tights."
         - Umberto Eco, /Travels in Hyperreality/

Annotations

  1. These lines are similar to those you'd find at the beginning of a million What I Did This Summer essays in grade school.

    The story is in fact true, at least as far as I remember.

    back

  2. Apparently it's still true that many temp agencies are reluctant to assign women to industrial jobs and men to clerical jobs, no matter how qualified they may be.

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  3. The spelling of End as Enb in this context is one of those misspellings that has caught on in ark for some reason. It appears to have first been used in 1997 in a transcript Matt McIrvin posted of a piece of literature written and illustrated by a five-year-old acquaintance of his.

    back

  4. I did in fact have a real estate-related temp job, at a bank showing houses to prospective purchasers. (The bank owned the houses as a result of foreclosing on the morgages of the previous owners of the houses.) So far there hasn't been a good opportunity to post about it on ark yet, but I'm keeping my eye out, you bet.

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