Life and collating

There come times in one’s life when all the various meandering paths along the twisting route to self-knowledge and peace come together briefly and unexpectedly in one absurd, though necessary and needed, job. It happened to me nine years ago one winter in downtown Seattle after I had headed West for the latest and final of my sojourns across the country looking for a way out of personal problems and a continuing life pattern of job-unemployment-job.

I mysteriously landed there in the "Emerald City" as a temporary clerk, through one of the infamous temp agencies, at one of the big mega law firms that scratch their way skyward in huge office towers that are located in all the great cities across our fair land. And, it just so happened that the place I was to work was the exact firm where I had been placed on my first temp job seven years earlier, during similar circumstances, and with the exact same supervisor. It was rather startling and uncanny, but life is really full of those significant and meaningful synchronicities, isn’t it?

Happy to be employed once again and in what I later discovered was the plum de la plums of temp jobs (those of you who have ever temped will know exactly what I am talking about). Here was a job shuffling papers and photo-copying documents produced during the discovery process in mega-corporate lawsuits for the purpose of attorney deposition preparation. There was no end to it in sight, so calling it a "temp" job was a misnomer. I became, in effect, a full-time employee of the firm without having any of the benefits. It happens all the time.

In that job, thousands and thousands of documents first had to be stamped and numbered, then filed in sturdy boxes, then painstakingly retrieved per attorney request, photo-copied, organized in black, three-ring binders and delivered to the attorneys on a deadline basis, sometimes under harrying deadline pressure.

It turns out that I and my fellow temps spent untold hours in front of high-end, sophisticated copy machines that would digest and emit multi-page documents, back and front copied, collated and stapled, all with mind-numbing efficiency, if all was working well. All did not always work well, however. When the machines had indigestion periodically, they bellowed and coughed and had horrible paper jams and behaved very badly and could really upset your whole day.

This rather mindless work went on for quite some months but in an atmosphere of the most soothing corporate amenities: snack and break room with free soft drinks and unlimited coffee; state of the art furniture, desks, telephones; and all in all, quiet, carpeted, spacious, roomy, reeking of big business, big power and ego trips behind the scenes.

But after hours of this work and similar tasks, the cumulative effect would be exhausting. The mind and soul would be worn down, grinding to a halt by the end of the day in sheer depression and desperation to get out of there. I had a feeling then that many jobs, for many people, were like this. But I had been lucky in the past and had held jobs that were stimulating, challenging and in which I engaged each day’s work with anticipation. Jobs can be that way. Not this one.

The saving grace, as in other times in the past, under slightly different circumstances, was the people, the co-workers, the fellow temps. What an amazing group of itnerant workers: highly educated, unsettled, in-between jobs and school, drifting artists, poets, actors, writers, former journalists and teachers (myself) — we were all thrown together for some reason and it clicked, and it was wonderful. We lifted each other up, we commisserated through the long days, we often went out to lunch together, we joked about everything. In situations like that, one has to maintain a sense of humor and perspective, at great peril to sanity if you don’t.

So I got to know some truly extraordinary people while engaged in doing the most mind-numbingly boring work imaginable. There were no silver lining in this work — it was soul and spriting crunching. Dead-end.

And I’ll never forget delivering boxes of finished work to the high-powered, $350-400 an hour attorneys up on the 47th floor, opening the door, depositing the documents, and invariably seeing the attorney not even raise his or her head in achknowlegement of my presence.

It was the friends and acquaintances who popped in the copy room and asked how I was doing as the copy machines whirred and hissed and cranked out their copies that kept me going. I will never forget them.