Shop Local, Pt 1.

I'd never temped before, but I had a friend who told me this place was looking for someone and I'd been out of work for about three months so I figured I'd give it a shot. So I went to their website and spent like 45 minutes filling out this really serious profile, and uploading my resume, and then I gave them a call and they told me to come in and take a few tests. One of the tests was a typing test. The other two were to be like the exact same tests I had to take to test out of the one and only class in college that I really just couldn't stand, the only class I ever withdrew from, "Foundations of Computer Applications." This is also the only class I failed in highschool, resulting in a summer grounded to the neighborhood. I just can't make myself give a shit about computers.

But I have to admit that I was somewhat stoked for the typing test. I like typing and am somewhat proud of my typing ability, being that it's a skill I forced myself to learn in recent years, and the opportunity to test myself was attractive. As it turns out, though, I can type plenty fast and accurate when I'm writing whatever I want, but the tests require that you retype something already written. The difference in my resulting word count was pretty severe, so I figured I'd better practice. I pulled up the clock on my computer and waited for the second hand to hit the 12 and then typed as fast as I could until it went around full circle. I must have done fifty separate word counts. Around and around and around went the hands on the clock until I realized that three hours had passed. I had a hard time believing that I'd been doing that for three hours, but there it was- the hour hand used to be over there, and now it was all the way over there. And all in all I didn't get any better, and in fact I did way worse on the test, by something like 15 words I think.

But they hired me anyway. Ten dollars an hour, doing data entry at a place called Shop Local. You know, those junk mail ads everyone gets. Yeah, that. My job was to import information from pdf ads into a database. I was never really clear on exactly what that was doing, but I'm pretty sure it was so the information popped up when you settled your mouse over this or that particular image. Anyway, the idea was to do it FAST. They wanted some really heroic productivity, so I had to keep myself jazzed on coffee all day long. The end result was me sitting in one spot for seven hours at a time, listening to music and clicking my mouse like a maniac. After the first day I did pretty well, and so they gave me 35 hours. I picked an early shift and happily settled myself into a routine.

The main thing to be happy about, at this point, other than the fact that I got to listen to music while I was working, which was awesome, was that after 330 I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to without being preoccupied. Three months leading up to this point I'd felt stressed out or guilty if I was doing anything other than looking for a job. And four years previous to that I'd been in school, which meant that if it wasn't summertime I felt stressed out whenever I was doing anything other than homework or studying. Now that I was getting up nice and early at the same time every day I could just find a seat on the train and crack open a book and forget about everything for duration of the commute for once. And I could watch a movie or play video games or go out for a beer when I got home, and hey no problem.

So that was nice.

After a couple of days my stop, the intersection of Lake and State, proved to be the Central Nexus point for what appeared to be the entire city's white collar working population. A savvy red-line rider, for example, would be sure to board the third to last car, because the doors opened right at the base of the escalator. Unfortunates aboard other cars found themselves on the outskirts of a groggy sea of under-caffeinated commuters rocking laterally as they oozed to within visual range of the bottleneck.

Outside, people from the brown and green line trains spilled out into the street as well, and swept eastward toward Michigan Ave. I’d seen the mad rush of businesspeople’s bobbing heads dramatized on tv plenty of times, but even though I’d lived in Chicago for a decade I'd never used Lake regularly or at that hour, so this was all new to me. At the corner I waited five people deep for the light to change, in a herd that spread out eleven to fifteen people wide. A new layer formed every thirty seconds or so as people joined us, like continuous drops of oil joining a pool. When I realized that pretty much everyone was headed into the same building as I was I found myself doing little things to reinforce my individuality to myself, like swinging my arms out like a kid pretending to be an airplane, or tightroping the potting partitions in the courtyard leading up to the revolving doors, beyond which a doorman greeted everyone with a smile and a “Good morning,” which for the first couple of days I returned with a nod and a smile of my own until I noticed he never looked me in the eye, as if he’d guessed (correctly) that there was no way I was going to last longer than a week.