Robots and Mail Merges

I have returned to the workforce. It's not necessarily a triumphant return. I'm on another temp assignment. I've been away from an office setting for a while, so I've been finding it a little difficult to readjust. I'd forgotten, for example, what disgusting habits people have. Our warren of cubicle walls, while effective at blocking sight, don't do nearly enough to muffle sound. I share a carpeted cube partition with a woman who likes to eat while she's talking on the phone. The fact that I'm not the one on the other end of the line makes no difference. I can still hear her talking with her mouth full, and it's still gross.

But that pales in comparison to the sound of fingernail clippers that sometimes comes from the cube cater corner to mine. Admittedly, I am quite squeamish about fingernails and am probably extra sensitive the noise that cutting them makes. But I would imagine most people might have a problem with their coworkers sending nail particles flying about the office. Having to listen while the owner of the clippers trimmed her nails one day was fairly painful. But an even higher threshold of disgusting office practices was crossed last week. The woman who sits in the cube behind me went over to her neighbor's unoccupied desk, borrowed the clippers from her drawer and started cutting her own nails with them while she was on the phone. I sat in my decidedly non-soundproofed cube, flinching with every snip of the clippers.

Yet on rare occasions, I'm glad to be able to overhear what goes on in the office. One recent verbal exchange proved to be very amusing. One woman, who usually prefers to complain very audibly about her divorce, was instead seething about a very condescending email she'd apparently received from a co-worker.
"I just can't stand the condensation any more!" she cried. "You know what? I'm smart!" Somehow, confusing the main word in her sentence seemed to belie her statement.

But worse than any ambient office sound I could hear is the crushing boredom of temp work. The setting may have changed from Class Action Place to Insurance Place, but the menial, vacuous tasks are the same. When the position was originally described to me, I was told that I'd be writing letters to inform people what they needed to submit before they could claim insurance money. That in itself sounded boring enough. But when I turned up on the first day, I learned that by writing letters, they meant filling in the blank fields in a form letter with the same pieces of information over and over.

The additional tasks I've been assigned over the last three weeks have continued to decrease in difficulty. First, my supervisor told me I'd be spending several hours a day helping to open the mail. This involves date stamping every single thing that arrives in every single envelope, so it's a very time-consuming process. And it seems to require an immense wealth of knowledge and skill compared to what occupied my time for most of the day today. I was tasked with removing the paper clips from large stacks of paper and then packing the paper into boxes. The elevator lobby on each floor is hung with a poster that encourages employees to submit their ideas on how the company could save costs. I was tempted to write an email that said something along the lines of "Stop paying a temp to do what robots and mail merges could do." But then I'd be out of a job.