Podcast Escapism

With the end of the year came the end of my assignment at Insurance Place. It never really improved. I continued to spend the majority of my time opening mail and folding forms. But I actually came to prefer this to writing letters, which is what I was hired to do. When opening mail, I could listen to my iPod. In addition to being entertaining, the podcasts I regularly downloaded made it possible for me to drown out the gossipy and inane conversation going on in the cubicles surrounding mine. I would much prefer to hear Ira Glass spin tales on This American Life than listen to my coworker repeatedly tell the story of how her daughter was up all night puking into a bucket. I find Terri Gross' interviews on Fresh Air much more enriching than my coworkers' hostile phone interrogations of their husbands.

While few people hesitated to share their personal business with the rest of the office, one person went above and beyond. A few months ago, she and I were some of the last people in the office. She took a call and, from phrases such as, "What about last weekend," "Was I just a conquest," "What do you want from me," and "I don't need a relationship," I determined that she was blatantly discussing an affair. I sit within plain sight of her, so she should have been aware of my presence. But I started making an excessive amount of noise just in case she wasn't. This did nothing to stop her all-too-detailed conversation. Unfortunately, the statement, "This has nothing to do with the baby; she's not even born yet" revealed exactly who her partner had been. One of two men in our department was soon to be a father. Suddenly it made sense why L had been complaining about how weird S had been that week. She'd been spurned. I'm not sure what S's relationship with the baby's mother is. Maybe it's not necessarily wrong that he's sleeping with someone else. But the whole thing disturbed me. Mostly because I just don't want to know.

I also didn't want to know about the boob job L had after Thanksgiving. But I heard all about it. Repeatedly. She told just about everyone in the office about it before she had it done, squealing about how excited she was and reveling in the dramatic story of how she had revealed the news to her daughter. She was out for two weeks for the procedure (which I relished), then returned wearing low-cut tops and complaining about how sore she was. I take mental notes about occurrences like this just in case I am ever hired to write a season of The Office. Unfortunately, a boob job episode has already been done. And whoever wrote it must have worked with someone just like L. I was frequently struck by how often she did or said something exactly like what Jan said or did after she had her boob job on The Office. I was also bemused by the behaviour of the other ladies in the office. Several of them came by to see the results for themselves, with one woman inquiring, "Do you have anything for show and tell?" I'm fairly certain I also heard one person ask if she could touch them.

As much as I liked tasks that allowed me to drown out such conversations with podcasts, I never became fond of packing up processed claims. This may be because I was offered more instruction on this aspect of my job than any other. I was supposed to remove all the clips from stacks of paper, put the paper into a box and tape the box shut. While this sounds like the most self-explanatory task one can be given, it sadly was not. The second time I packed up the claims, I attached a mailing sheet to the top of the box as I had been instructed. I taped all four sides of the form just like I had the previous month. The next day, my supervisor forwarded an email she had received from one of the people in the mail room which stated that that we should only use one small piece of tape when attaching the form. Above the forwarded message, she had written, "FYI." For your information, too, I thought. I would never have done something as pointless as taping a form on all four sides if she hadn't told me to do so.

I had a few more claims to pack up on the day that I received the tape instructions email. I very deliberately only used one small piece of Scotch tape to attach the mailing form to the remaining box. But the next day, another forwarded email was waiting for me. "The box yesterday had almost as much tape on it as the day before," the mail room person griped. Above this message, my boss had reiterated the instruction to only use one small piece of tape. I replied immediately, writing that I had only used one small piece of tape. I explained that after I had taped the box shut, one of my coworkers had reopened it to take out a claim she had given me accidentally. She had retaped the box herself, and, I told my boss, could have taped over the mailing sheet. Maybe it wasn't noble to call out my coworker, but there's no way I was going to make it look as though I couldn't follow so simple an instruction.

If she were to provide a similarly detailed explanation about proofreading to her other employees, then they might stop sending out letters that included wrong names in the salutations, misspellings of cities and incorrect verb tenses. Sometimes the mistakes I found were comical. I was supposed to send follow-up letters to people who needed to submit documents before we could pay out their death claim. To find out what documents I should ask for, I had to look at the last letter the claims examiner had sent. One of these letters was addressed to the city of Creep, Illinois. I was skeptical about the likelihood of anyone naming their city Creep, so I typed the city, state and zip code into the Google maps search bar. The result read, "Did you mean Crete, IL?" Sigh. In another case, the beneficiary was listed as Rabbi Someone-Or-Other. The examiner had crossed out Rabbi and written "Robbi." On the letter, they reduced the Rabbi's actual first name to a middle initial following the first name Robbi. I did a search for "Rabbi What's-His-Face" on Google just to make sure I wasn't uncorrecting a valid correction. Sure enough, the person is listed on several websites as the leader of a Jewish congregation. He name is not Robbi.

To be fair, several of my coworkers were nice and I appreciated my boss letting me adjust my schedule around my class. But I'm glad my assignment is over. It could very well be the last temp job I have. I'm enrolled as a full-time student for this coming semester, and my classes and internship at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will take up most of my 9-to-5 hours. I'll have to work what is likely to be an unfulfilling job on the evenings and weekends to make up for it. But, when an unfulfilling job is paired with making great strides in another direction, it doesn't seem so bad.