My Arch Nemesis

I’ve had my share of boring office jobs. This is, I concede, entirely my own fault, due to equal parts fear and laziness. I’ve steadfastly refused to learn anything practical, because if I acquire the skills necessary to become, for example, an accountant or a marketing analyst or a computer technician, then I’d have to be an accountant or a marketing analyst or a computer technician. These are all very fine jobs, and the people who fill them will always make more money than I do, but I’m not interested. If I’m going to spend half my waking life working, I’d at least like to not hate it. That’s the fear. The laziness part comes in when you consider that I have yet to come up with any form of gainful employment that I might enjoy. Sigh.

This leaves, for my skill set, boring office jobs. How amusing. I’m afraid of hating my work, so I wind up stuck doing the one thing that drives me absolutely batty. If nothing else, office jobs make for excellent stories.

There was the summer I spent entering data for a Biographical Institute in Rhode Island. We were in a two room building with no air and one window, which our boss wanted to board up so we couldn’t be distracted by passersby. The temperature inside regularly reached the mid-nineties. I collapsed of heat stroke one afternoon. Nevertheless, the boss refused to buy an air-conditioning unit until someone told him the extreme heat could fry his computers – ancient things they were, the kind with black screens and orange letters, everything entered by code – and so he picked up a rusty, sputtering old clunker of an air conditioner, which he probably found on the sidewalk somewhere, and pointed it at the computers instead of us. It was just as well. Its noxious fumes could not have been good for one’s constitution.

I once temped for an association for two weeks. My only task was to create labels for their filing cabinets. That took one and a half days. Fun times.

But for mind-numbing boredom, nothing beats the summer before I started college. I worked at the tool factory where my father worked as a photographer, the factory that probably employs half my hometown. My job was to sit in the main office and file invoices. All day long.

I arrived for my first day, fresh and bright and excited to have a job that didn’t involve screaming children, and met my fellow filer, who sat me down to give me a tutorial on the alphabet.

“OK. This here,” she pointed to a series of metal index cards astride a long board, “is what we use to alphabetize our invoices. It makes filing them easier. If you have something that begins with A you put it behind the ‘A’. So ‘Armstrong, Inc.’ goes behind the ‘A’. See?”

I saw.

“Ah, here we have ‘American Tools.’ That goes behind the ‘A’, too, but in front of ‘Armstrong’, because M comes before R in the alphabet.”

Indeed.

“Oh, look, ‘Litchfield.’ That goes behind ‘L’, right here,” she continued.

Please, dear Lord, save me.

“Now, the T’s can be awfully tricky. If you have something like ‘Tools,’ or ‘Tobias McArthur,’ they’d go behind the ‘T’…oh, except that ‘Tobias McArthur’ would be filed under ‘M.’ Well, anyway, ‘Tools’ is still filed behind ‘T,’ but something like ‘The Saw Company’ would not be filed behind ‘T,’ because there are so many names that begin with ‘the.’ So they would be filed under whatever came after ‘the.’”

This went on for a while.

Life would have been nice and boring that summer indeed, except that I found myself, quite unexpectedly, with an arch nemesis. I’ll call her “Carol,” because that was her name. From the moment she first saw me, Carol decided that I was the single most stupid person she had ever met, that I was living, breathing proof that nepotism would be the ruin of America, and that my sole aim that summer was to sabotage the company by misfiling everything.

Late that first morning she came to me, all in a dither, because she could not find an invoice. People came to the filing area all day long, found an invoice, scribbled down information on a post-it note, and then gave me the invoice back to file. That was my job. Later, incidentally, I’d have to file the post-it note, too, although I could never understand why.

I couldn’t find her invoice, either. I went through every invoice in the cabinet where it should have been.

“You’re not off to a very good start, are you?” Carol said, sweetly. Her tone was always sickly saccharine, as if she were dipping her barbs in layers of honey, evidently feeling that gave her license to say the most horrid things. “If you’ve managed to misfile something on your first day, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

I stuttered out an apology and quickly sat down. She caught me so off guard that it was minutes later before I realized that I hadn’t filed anything yet. I had spent the morning learning how to alphabetize.

I’m not sure if I began associating Carol with the Forces of Evil because she was evil, (which she was) or because she was fond of wearing black and silver and kept pictures of cats all over her cubicle. Invariably, after accusing me of hiding her invoices or insinuating that I was a moron who couldn’t even spell, we would find the invoice she needed…squirreled away beneath her computer monitor. It was always my fault, somehow, that the invoice was buried beneath all the crap on her desk. I’d crept up to her chair one day, apologizing that I couldn’t find the invoice she’d just asked me for, and she turned on me with her Cheshire Cat smile. “Honestly, you do waste time. I have that invoice right here!” she said. “I can see you’re going to really ‘wow’ them at Brown.”

Oh, she was horrible. A nasty piece of work. What kind of bitter old lady picks on eighteen year old kids? I’ll tell you what kind. The kind that is stuck in a boring office job for thirty years, that’s what kind. This is why it’s imperative that I find my life’s calling, and soon. Otherwise, I could find myself, somewhere down the road, surrounded by cat pictures, bitching at children and making them file my scribbled-on post-it notes. And I don’t even like cats.