1.) 1993: My first temp job was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I answered the phone at a construction company in an anonymous office park in New Jersey. The director’s name was “Colin.” He pronounced his name with a long O, Powell-style, and was always running off to the bathroom in a post-lunch emergency, stopping at my desk to clutch his belly and moan: “Lisa, please hold my calls, ooh-wee, that was a spicy lunch today.” Before I left I “liberated” stacks of Post-It notes and notepads from the supply closet, which fueled my compulsive to-do list habit for years.

2.) 1994: The summer before I started college, I filled in at a long-forgotten company for an administrative assistant who was leaving her job. It turned out she was the mother of one of my high school classmates, a girl I’d never spoken to or even been in a class with, though we’d been at the same school for four years. Our existences were completely peripheral to one another: she was blonde, popular, perky, a cheerleader for the football team. I was one of maybe five students of color in the entire grade, the editor of the high school newspaper, and my hobbies included scowling, agitprop art, and an attitude of cultural superiority that poorly masked my massive insecurities and self-hatred.

The mother of my classmate recognized my name, oddly enough. She looked like her daughter’s shorter-haired older sister, and was probably a good seven years younger than my own mother. She trained me for two days before leaving and assumed the task of trying to improve me, telling me that I was too serious. “It wouldn’t hurt to smile more. Lighten up… turn that frown upside down!” (My mother often expressed similar sentiments.) This made me hate her even more, and I was relieved when she finally left me alone to draft memos and write ten-page letters to my pen-pals, print them out on office stationery, and mail them via the office postage meter.  

In retrospect, I wonder what it must have felt like for her to “train” her successor, a girl who was her own daughter’s age, still in high school, when she herself had been working at this job for years. And me, who was “only temping” before leaving for college at a four-year private school, who thought she was too good for the likes of cheerleaders (and blondes). My classmate’s mother was right; I could have taken myself far less seriously. I was a brat and a snob. The job was a lark for me, a way to make a few more bucks because it paid better than food service. It was ironic and amusing for me to play secretary for a few weeks over the summer and make a little cash for college. But it had been her career.

3.) 1997: My last year of college, I had a week-long job in a desolate highway office park in central Connecticut, at a company that manufactured magnetic parts. My job was to answer a phone that never rang. Sitting at the front desk, I read all of Infinite Jest that week, all 1,100 pages of it. I’d bought the book out of morbid curiosity months before, but could never bring myself to start reading it because I felt so deeply irritated by DFW’s long-hair-and-bandana author pic on the back cover, and what I thought was his arrogance in daring to write a book that fucking long. But what better time to read it – read all of it! – than while on the clock? The phrase “cold foamer” still floats sweetly into my head from time to time, like the memory of an old crush.

4.) 2003: I was in between jobs in San Francisco, forever trying to work on the same collection of short stories and never succeeding, when I was called in for a short-term gig at a tax attorney’s office downtown. “Just some light editing and typing, probably legal briefs and documents like that,” the agency told me. I was shown a desk with a computer and a large stack of paper. The lawyer instructed me to input the hard-copy changes into a Word version of the document. No problem! I began light editing and typing away.

The first pages detailed a scene at a dinner party. Straight narrative, with dialogue, setting, the works. I’d read amicus briefs before, and was vaguely familiar with legal writing, but this document was unusually descriptive. “I guess it makes sense for lawyers to be descriptive when writing these briefs, in order to really get into the case,” I thought. “That’s cool.”

But by page six things started to get weird. There was talk of interplanetary travel, even time travel. And I realized I had been hired on the company’s dime to input edits for the tax attorney’s science fiction novel. There were nearly 700 typed pages of novel, with long, detailed diversions into the legal and government systems of the different planets – Planet Axon’s was parliamentary – as well as some handwritten scenes he later had me type up, which rewrote parts in first person and played around with tenses.

Eventually I let it slip that I was also a writer and had worked as an editor.  “Well, do you think it could get published?” he asked me.

The writing was clunky. There were a lot of lines like “Hurriedly, she flew towards the stairs. Glintingly, his gimlet eyes turned towards her cape.” But I said sure, he should try to get it published. Because even if I was going through a self-righteous phase of eliminating all adverbs at all times from all my writing (They must be purged! howled the rules-hungry students of creative writing workshops everywhere) there was one true difference between him and me: He had finished his book. I hadn’t finished mine.

P.S. If anyone knows how I could get paid a lawyer’s salary to finish my book at work, hit me up.