Trailer Temp

In order to finance my exploration of the Twin Cities music scene, I've taken up more or less gainful employment with a temp agency. While I was originally looking and hoping for a job in advertising, I tried to stay positive about the situation. I decided that I would be like Ryan the Temp on The Office. I would be sent to a slightly bizarre and dysfunctional office, meet some interesting people, and create a stock of writing material that would last for years.

After exhausting me with math, spelling, filing, typing and computer software exams, the temp agency called back the same afternoon to offer me an assignment. I arrived at the Minnesota Green Expo at half 6 the next morning, bleary-eyed and dressed in my former Olive Garden uniform. My duties involved typing information into a Word document, printing name tags, affixing star or dot stickers to them when necessary, stuffing them into a plastic clip-on protector, and finally handing them to the registrants. Far from being the long, excruciating day I'd anticipated, the time flew by. The queues were huge, and we were kept quite busy.

Fortunately, my stint at the Green Expo was only three days. The work was perfectly acceptable, but I am desperately trying not to re-acquire the elongated vowels of my former Minnesota accent. The Green Expo, attended by a large number of outstate landscapers and nurserers, was definitely not the place for my mimic's ear if I wanted to continue to stave it off successfully. The proliferation of general ohhhhhh's and aaaaaaae's, and especially someone's comment about a "bohhh-t," demonstrated to me that there is at least a little truth in the stereotypical accent portrayed in Fargo.

The assignment I began the following week seemed to be an immediate improvement, if only because I would be starting at 8 instead of 6.30. I successfully navigated the buses and arrived at the building early. When I walked inside, eager to escape the cold, I found a slightly less frigid entryway that smelled of of canned fruit that had just gone off. After finding the doors to the main office locked, I happened upon a different office under the stairs. The receptionist buzzed me in, and we chatted for a bit. She informed me that the company was a potato processing plant. While that was interesting, the sentence from the conversation that really stands out in my mind is, "Did you know you'll be working out in a trailer?"

So I spent the last two weeks working in a trailer at a potato factory.

As you might imagine, it turned out to be rather entertaining. The job itself required fairly low brain-wattage: alphabetising, hole-punching, filing, filling out forms, stapling, entering data. But I liked my fellow HR trailer occupants. At regular intervals I would take a break from my clerical tasks and cover the receptionist while she went on breaks. The route to her office under the stairs took me through the maintenance area of the plant, where I was always greeted by the smell of potatoes. But not just normal potatoes. Potatoes that had been trodden upon and left on the ground to soak up some indeterminate liquid and spoil. I'm not sure what brought this image to my mind (perhaps the constantly wet door handle), but it seems to be the only sufficient way to describe the smell.

Generally not much was required of me when I was covering reception. Between phone calls, I usually had plenty of time to read or examine the numerous paper cuts I'd acquired. But that's not to say that strange things never happened. On one occasion, a man appeared outside the glass windows of the office and shouted that he needed a favour. Probably against my better judgment, I buzzed him in. He pointed out a dump truck near a line of semis and asked me if he could park it there overnight. Apparently the brakes had gone out and a mechanic wouldn't be available to service it until the next morning. His dump truck was not affiliated with the company in any way, so I called the plant manager to see if that was OK. He flatly refused, I relayed the information to the suddenly belligerent driver, and he stalked out.

During my second week on the assignment, I went on a tour of the plant. I felt a little guilty for going with the plant manager instead of the safety guy who had repeatedly offered me a private tour, but it was fascinating nonetheless. I was outfitted in a white coat, boots, a hairnet, a hard hat and earplugs. It was as though I was participating in one of the segments on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood where they toured factories and taught the audience how things were made. Recalling it now, I can remember Mr. Rogers' exploration of a crayon factory down to a disconcerting level of detail. I'm not exactly sure if this is because I was really interested in crayons (I was) or had a previously unrevealed affinity for factories (apparently). Regardless, I was happy to discover that the odor coming from the plant itself was far more pleasing than that I regularly encountered in the maintenance room.

Despite my initial incredulity, I grew a little fond of the potato plant over the weeks. It was my last day there on Friday. And while leaving has not made me sad to the degree that I'm going to visit the grocery store and press my face against the freezers where they store our hash browns, I have to admit I enjoyed my time there. Maybe I already found my Dunder Mifflin.