The good old days

There's really not a lot to say about the job I'm doing at the moment. I come in at 8.45, wince as dogsbody Jeff gives me a rancid cup of tea and get stuck into the day's work. At the end of it, I'm gone. I've been temping for years now and I'm sure they used to seem more eventful. It got me thinking about other temping jobs I've had.

Handing out orange juice at an exhibition

This was one of my very first assignments and was supposed to last two weeks. "Any more than that and you'll kill yourself" my then agent had said, which had bene very reassuring. I actually lasted three. The job involved dressing up in a very orange outfit which consisted of a kind of leotard with a horrible blue pleated skirt overt the top. Like a gym outfit really. As people arrived at this very boring and second rate trade exhibition my job along with two other girls was to hand out small trial sizes of orange juice that had had some kind of vitamin pumped into it to make it more healthy. Ordinarily this would be a total nightmare but the one saving grace was the look on the drinkers faces as they supped the juice. It tasted like shit and probably had weird side effects and not one person thought it was any way decent and worth finishing the absolutely tiny sample. The weeks just flew by.

Demonstrating a trouser press

Yet another trade exhibition. I was working as a temp in the office of an electrical firm and they wanted someone to do the Ideal Home and demo a trouser press and a coffee machine. No-one wanted to do it but I hated the office and saw it as an opportunity to escape. Amazingly, they agreed to let me do it. Me and a guy from the office were entrusted with the precious objects and people from work would pop by every now and again to check on us. Needless to say we got bored very quickly and so would ad lib quite a lot when it came to describing what the products could do. Penis enlargement, zero gravity and dry cleaning were just three of the hidden functions we said the coffee machine could do. We were very young and stupid. In between fanciful lies we put just about anything we could in the trouser press and dropped small blocks of hash in our cappuccino. We were never caught but going back to the office seemed so dull afterwards and we both left the company to do, other things. In my case, more temping. Am I ever going to grow up?