The continuing adventures of the Last Temp Job:

Sometime this morning we finished the tab tearing. Finally. My fingers were actually cramping from all the tearing I had to do. This lead to several hours of thumb twiddling as they weren't quite ready for the next part. Now, I'm as down with getting paid to thumb twiddle as the next person, probably moreso in fact, but I still couldn't but help to feel a little pissy because I had asked for the time off and was made to work some more. I was not working. After lunch came the next bit.

See, what we're dealing with is test packets consisting of eight notebooks. Each notebook is a separate color and each packet is coded. When we were filing the stuff, we were filing them in sequential order based on the code. What they wanted us to do now was to take the packets apart and then separate them sequentially by color. All the blues were now to be put together as well as all the yellows and greens and so on. And, as I said, they still had to be in numerical order. What this basically means is that after first filing them, then refiling them after they were recoded, we were now refiling them again. How this was done is that basically they took these eight dividers, put them next to each other on a small table, then have us one-by-one take a packet and go down the side putting the colored notebook in it's corresponding divider. One big huge, Henry Ford-like sorting system. Once we had sorted all eight notebooks, we'd then go back to the front of the table to get the next one and since there's only eight of them, it took about thirty seconds to do them. Once we'd get 50 sorted, we'd put a rubber band on them and then put them on the shelf for the fourth time.

I did this for about four hours today. Tomorrow, the first day of my wanna-be day off, I'll be doing it for eight hours. And with the expected Post-Writing Group hangover too. The best part? Because we're a team of people doing it, unlike the tab tearing, it's a bit more noticeable if I do stuff like come in late, take long breaks, and hour-long lunches. Oh, and I forgot this bit- when we started the sorting, one of the head temps, a Chinese guy who speaks about ten words of English stood over me and the other Temp, making sure we got what we were doing. Just in case we were confused about whether the brown notebook was supposed to go in the brown notebook divider or the yellow divider folder.

This whole temp job is getting to be kind of like when you break up with somebody but still find yourself having to go to a couple of social functions with the ex, like visiting Grandma or a wedding, because you were already committed and can't get out of it. Except extremely boring and with no alcohol.