Featured

Heavy Plant

Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imag...

2005-07-15

temping:2

Okay, it's been a month and I am thoroughly sick of being a filing clerk. Working here is like some sick parody, a bit like The Office but with a darker tone. All the characters are certainly here (all names have been changed to...er...no sod it, they need to know what a bunch of freaks they really are, and if they find this it'll be a bloody miracle:


Liz
Liz is genuinely physically impaired. Through some hideous accident of birth her left upper arm is about half the length of her right. She would normally get my patience and sympathy but unfortunately she can also be loudmouthed beligerent and dogmatic to the point of me actually having to walk away from her. She has an idiotic high-pitched laugh which she uses every three minutes without fail on items of conversation that would not elicit a chuckle from a nervous hyena. Liz's nose appears to emit a strong gravitational field which has, over the natural course of time, sucked the features of her over-wide face into it's middle and elongated both eyebrows.

Patricia
Patricia has the most deadpan sense of humour I have ever witnessed and takes great delight in saying the most miserable possible things to you without a flicker of emotion passing accross her face. She would be very hard to read had I not caught the slightest most momentary upturn of one corner of her mouth when she does it. She also gets the hiccups at least twice a day, very loudly.

Gail
Gail is a great person and very easy to work with but English is very much her second language. She flits around the office in a very businesslike way and generally gets the job done. Her favourite trick is to jab me in the ribs with a biro and say, "You mean to me Tom, you saying me a bad girl!" and giggle maniacly.

Lynette
Lynette is of Italian descent and is very pretty. She also knows it and can be an unbearable flirt. When Andrew, a typical Aussie of the 6 foot sheap shearing rugby playing type, joined the office she melted into butter. "Andrew's a country boy, aren't you Andrew? I'm a country girl, I like country boys, don't you like country boys Gail?", all this whilst fluttering her eyelashes in the most cartoonish possible way. I could have punched her were it not for the fact that she is the only thing of aesthetic value in the entire building.

Renee
The biggest mouth of the section belongs to Renee, as does the widest arse (it's funny how often those two go together isn't it?). Renee is going nowhere and doing it fast. She is a genuinely dead-end person, unfortunately the end that is dead has her head on it. Renee has the work ethic of a primadonna celebrity hooked on strong painkillers. Renee likes to act the boss and she's crap at it. I subtly started suggesting tasks to her so that she wasn't anywhere near me for the larger part of the day. She is engaged to Tim, who I can only assume, was roughly chopped, Pinochio like, from one of the branches of the ugly tree, one of the the long thin knobbly ones near the top.

George
I can't for the life of me work out what is wrong with George. He looks vaguely simian and indeed walks like a chimp that has had the idea of life on the ground explained to it and is doing it's best to fit in. George likes to talk, Christ George likes to talk. Unfortunately he is one of the least interesting people I have ever met. He warbles incessantly about the infantile processes going on in his head. He talks about the ridiculous amounts of yoga that he does, he talks about global events from his own, far from unique, perspective: "...both sides think they're fighting evil". If you try and walk away from George whilst he is talking to you he will follow you around as you work until he has finished talking. Eventually all you want is this well-meaning chatter to stop and you are quite prepared to tie George up in knots to achieve this, which is probably why he does so much yoga. I have come to the sad conclusion that George is just a fuckwit.

Thankfully I now have my long-stay business visa to stay in Australia and work as a resident until 2009. I have registered with a whole bunch of recruitment agencies and will hopefully not be working there much longer...please God.