New temp job. Started today. Eleven bucks an hour for general office work. Runs til next Monday with the possibility of Saturday work thrown in for good measure. The job's in the bowels of the Federal Building, in an unventilated, windowless office in order to get to, I have to go through a metal-detector and an x-ray machine.

I'm one of five temps for the week. The 24-year old or so girl whose running the project explains what the job is. Basically, it's for a security firm. They got a Federal contract sometime over the summer to hire all the Private Security Guard's at all the Federal Buildings. Then 9/11 happened and bingo, the company hit the jackpot, got tons of new money to hire new Security Guards for every Federal Building in the country. Now the company's scrambling, trying to set up new offices and hire anyone (and I mean anyone) with a gun permit and Security Guard license. Due to the usual bureaucratic reasons, the 24 year old girl just flew in from Washington with the orders to get the San Francisco office up and running by next week. Wired on too much coffee already and chugging a bottle of Starbucks iced mocha, she tells us that our job is to answer the phones, file, and help them sort through the endless amounts of applications that are flying in. If we're really lucky, we'll get a rental car and go pick-up guards who have been already hired and take them to a medical clinic for their final medical check-up. They've had to hire people so fast, half of them haven't been properly checked out yet.

I look through the files of applications and try to find files that haven't been fully processed yet. Yes, it's boring as all hell, but at least it's giving me a sense of security knowing that they'll pretty much hire anyone as long as they know how to wield a gun and baton. I spend my time thinking about the 24-year old girl whose running the show. I wonder how she got here, working for a security firm. I guess she's fresh out of college and it's probably her first job. I'm guessing too, working for a security guard firm is not what she set out to do when she graduated. She could have graduated with a Law Enforcement degree, but I somehow doubt that. Doesn't look the type. I'm guessing she got a Business Degree and this was the best job she could get and now she finds herself working with fat, over the hill wanna-be cops, half of whom barely speak English. I wonder if this is where she saw herself when she graduated and is she really happy on the job.

As I watch her, and as I file away, I realize that she's not really doing anything that complicated. Nothing that takes any special type of training. Like the young chippies who were full-time employees at the last place I temped, as I watched them, I couldn't see them doing anything that I couldn't do. I've done jobs like theirs, only different.

But why am I unemployed and why not them? Why am I sitting there, filing away for eleven bucks an hour? How come they have good jobs and I don't?

Where did it all go wrong?