It's Friday at my Temp job and once again, my supervisor isn't in. As I go take a peek at his office, I see that the lights are off and the door is locked. I ask the Office Manager/Receptionist if the guy is coming in or not and he doesn't know. Not only that, he doesn't think he is just because he's a big sales guy and is usually on the road.

Great.

I don't like the look of this. Don't like the look at all. Nuh-uh. When you throw in a Supervisor whose too busy and crazed to remember that you're there and a Temp Agency run by boneheads (when I interviewed there, the computer broke down in the middle of the test and when I went to go let them know, I saw the guy whose in charge with his feet up on his desk, fully reclined, staring out the window with his hands clasped behind his back) it makes me think Capital T trouble. In other words, I got a bad feeling about this and lately I've been realizing that whenever I got a bad feeling about anything, it usually happens.

It also occurred to me that I'm entering a "Seinfeld" moment. To whit, what would happen if I kept on showing up at a Temp job and between the craziness of the office and the semi-secluded nature of my cubicle, nobody notices that I'm there. Could I keep on coming back? Could I drag it out for a couple of months? If I keep showing up and nobody says anything would it become so normal that I'd be considered part of the company? Am I just one box of doughnuts in a meeting away from making the vaunted leap from temp to perm?

Hmmmm….

The crazy thing is that I've been in that situation before (yeah, I know, quelle surprise). Years ago, during Layoff #1, I was trying to make it as a Freelance Graphic Artist. I went to one Design Agency, a place that could only be described as the Worst Design Agency in the city (seriously, there were coffee stains on the coffee stains). The interview went well enough that the lady who ran it, a frumpy middle-aged woman who I'm pretty sure got the thing in a divorce settlement, told me to come back the next day for a "tryout." So I go in the next day, get a buttload of work, do a good job, and am told to come back the next day. I go back the next day, have more work thrown at me, and the next day after that.

Now since I didn't hear anything, I just went into work assuming I had work and that I was working there. And while nobody said I got the job, nobody told me that I didn't. Of course, it would have helped if the owner of the company were actually in the office to tell me what the deal was. She was hardly ever in the office as she was constantly on sales calls trying to drum up business, sales calls that usually consisted of buying clothes at Nordstrom.

A few weeks into the job, with me working pretty much 40 hour weeks, work slowed down and my coworker, a nice Born Again who was new to the city and whose previous job mainly consisted of air-brushing out cleavage for a Christian Music Label, told me it wasn't worth me coming in and to go home. The next day I called up to see if I should come in or not and was told by the owner that it wasn't going to work out and that she wasn't happy with my work. A fair enough assessment perhaps, but one that would have been nice to hear maybe a couple of days into it instead of, oh, a couple of weeks into it. A couple of weeks which were coincidentally busier than usual work-wise.

Naturally, she refused to pay me over a time-sheet issue. Bitch.

Oh wait, where was I. Oh yes.

Okay, so there I am at the Temp job, not knowing what to do and go take a walk to the Temp agency (whose going to know I'm gone?). They tell me to hold tight and that they'll call my supervisor. Back at the office, while I'm typing away the Office Manager hands me a cell phone, tells me it's my supervisor and that it's for me. My supervisor gives me some instructions, making it sound the whole time like he meant to take care of me, and told me he'll be in later. Which he was. Except he was also conducting interviews all day. Here I am trying to update him on the stack of work that he had me do a stack of work that I couldn't complete because I needed to hear back from him, yet unable to hear back from him.

At the end of the day I waltzed into his office while in the middle of an interview to give him my time sheet. As I suspected, it's not clear whether or not I'm going in there next week. I think I am, but I'm not sure. I also have a couple of interviews early next week so it's not like I can go in anyways, but I don't really know for sure.

Maybe I'll just show up and type away and see what happens?