Spur of the Moment (3 page)

4

Adventures in Temp Hell

M
arin had put off going into work for as long as possible, and as soon as she got there she called Ana and Scott so they could entertain her. She kept Scott on the phone for as long as she could, but when her boss for the next week, Shirley, started lurking behind her, with a perm that even extended to her bangs, making her look like she had a fringed orange stuck to her forehead, Marin figured she should probably let him go.

“I really appreciate you calling me with the offer, sir, but even though it's more money than I'm making here, I can't leave this company in a lurch,” Marin said.

“Boss standing there?” Scott said.

“Yes. Thanks again. And do keep me in mind if any full-time positions open up after I've fulfilled my obligations here.” She hung up the phone. “Well, hello Shirley.”

“Just to keep things exciting, I have another important job for you to do,” Shirley said. “We need to get two hundred packets together for the sales training on Monday. Here's the original. The binders are in the copy room. Make two hundred copies, hole-punch them, and put them in the binders. You can alternate between this and printing the documents to keep things fun!”

“Printing things out or making copies. It's like Christmas every day here, just one big party!” Marin didn't say this sarcastically, she said it like it genuinely was the best news she'd heard all day, but Shirley tittered weakly, like she wasn't getting the joke. Shirley strode off purposefully, and Marin went to the copy room. She put the stack of paper in the tray and hit the copy button. It pulled the first few pages through and then got stuck.

Marin looked at the copier as if waiting for a fit of inspiration. She had worked very hard to never learn how to fix a jammed copier or copy machine. If someone ever tried to explain it to her, she promptly made sure she forgot everything they said. There were some things it just didn't pay to know.

Every now and then, like when she had to spend her days printing out documents and making copies, being acutely bored out of her mind, she wondered if perhaps she should try to get a real job. She'd been asked to stay on by more than one of the places she'd temped at, but she'd always said no. She knew she'd get too depressed going to the same dreary job day after day. At least as a temp, each day had possibility for something good. You never knew what could happen.

It was obvious to Marin that she was either going to have to become a famous comedian or marry rich, because this working-at-an-office shit was clearly not for her.

Marry rich. Marriage. Yeah right. She hadn't even had a serious boyfriend since high school. Finding someone she wanted to marry was not going to be easy. Guys were just too easy, too predictable. They always fell head over heels for her. They became simpering idiots around her. She needed more of a challenge. She liked Jason—he was cute and good in bed and all that (they sometimes slept together when they were between relationships)—but his infatuation with her was hopeless. What did he think, she was going to marry a school teacher who made like, what, maybe $30,000 a year? Daughters of prominent New York investment bankers did not grow up to marry high school teachers.

It's not that she thought money meant happiness; she had two parents who proved there was no correlation. But Marin didn't plan to spend her entire life broke. Maybe someday she'd hit the big time and she could marry a guy just based on love without considering anything else about him, but to pretend like money didn't matter was a fairy tale. There was romance and then there was reality—Marin wanted love, but she also wanted a big house, vacations every year, and a blindingly large diamond ring. That might seem selfish or overly pragmatic, but Marin didn't care: It was the stone cold truth.

Until rich Mr. Right came along, a more steady income would certainly come in handy, though, and temping was anything but steady. Every time she called her dad for money she got a lecture about how it was time to grow up, and why couldn't she be more like her older brother, who already had a good career following in his daddy's footsteps and making tons of money, blah blah blah.

Marin couldn't help it. She just couldn't be an investment banker; she didn't have it in her. Since she was a little girl she'd had the performing bug. When you have a father who works hundred-hour weeks and a mother who rarely pays attention to you even if you're the only person in the room, you learn quickly how to be funny and adorable and generally pleasing. You take whatever shreds of attention you can get, any way you can get them.

She would have ended up in a theater department no matter where she went to school, but she was glad for the twist of fate that brought her to the University of Colorado and to her friends that she met there. She was confident that she'd make it as an actress. She didn't want to divert her energies by working on a career at an office.

She stared at the copier. She needed more coffee before she could make any decisions about what to do. Marin went to the kitchen and smiled warmly at the young guy standing there, adding sugar to his coffee. She opened cabinets until she found where they kept the coffee mugs.

“Hi. Are you new here? I'm Trevor.”

“I'm a temp. I'm just here for the week. Hey, the copier is stuck. Do you know who I should go to to get it fixed?”

“You're talking to him. I work in technical support,” he said, smiling broadly.

“This must be my lucky day.”

In the copy room, Trevor opened a couple of doors on the copier and tore out a sheet of paper that had been caught. “That should do it.” He smiled triumphantly. “What did you say your name was?”

He hit P
RINT
, and the very next page that went through got stuck. Trevor opened the door and tore out another sheet of rumpled paper. Then another sheet and another. He closed the copier door and still the “paper is stuck here” button was flashing. He opened the door again and pulled out more paper, then he struggled to get the ink cartridge out. It came loose in one quick motion, spraying his chest and face with black ink.

Marin tried very hard not to laugh.

5

Villainous Cattle Ranchers and Spineless Principals

J
ason was unusual among his group of friends in that he was one of the very few of them that wouldn't necessarily love to quit their day job. (Scott liked being a graphic designer, but if he could work full time as a comedian or artist and never have to deal with the likes of The Big Weasel ever again, he would give his notice in a nanosecond.) Jason really did enjoy teaching. Most of the time.

The times he didn't like it were times like these, when he'd been called into the principal's office after second-period sophomore biology to confront a red-faced, spluttering cattle rancher, the father of one of the boys in Jason's seventh-period biology class, who was accusing Jason of teaching his child socialist propaganda, encouraging vegetarianism, and spreading lies about the effects of pesticides.

In the lessons the irate man was referring to, Jason had explained to his students the environmental costs of the food Americans consumed. He talked about how fewer and fewer farmers could make a living farming in America anymore, and how as a result, the food Americans ate came from foreign countries that didn't have to follow the same laws regarding pesticides and chemicals that American farmers did, meaning pesticides that had been banned for years here in the States were shipped right back into the country from foreign lands. He had talked about how Americans bought food even when it was out of season, so they could have the fruits and vegetables they liked all year long, which led to produce that was shipped from so far away that to get here in one piece, it had to be picked at the wrong time and plugged up with chemicals, which resulted in tomatoes and apples that tasted like red-colored sawdust. He said that the average food Americans bought at the supermarket had to travel 1400 miles, causing a colossal expenditure of fossil fuels. He reminded them of the lesson they'd had earlier on the ozone layer, and the damage wrought by car emissions as well as the fact that the amount of oil available on the planet was finite, and by some estimates would be gone by as early as 2025. While they were discussing the ozone layer, he also said that one of the worst things for the ozone was the gaseous emissions of cattle. “Their flatulence,” he'd added, which made the class giggle. He'd pointed out to his students that to produce one pound of beef, ten pounds of grains were required. He said that if everyone ate a vegetarian diet, no one on the face of the earth would have to go hungry.

The solution to these problems was to shop locally, eat less meat, and, if possible, grow some of your food yourself. He talked about his own small garden, and how amazing the food tasted, and how rewarding it was to share the food with friends when it was fresh and in season.

“Sir, I in no way try to influence the eating habits of my students. I just believe in telling them the facts and letting them make informed choices,” Jason said to the cattle rancher father.

“You don't let an impressionable child make choices on his own. You think you hand a twelve year old the keys to a car and hope they make a good decision?”

“Sir?” Jason wasn't clear how this analogy in any way pertained to the discussion they were having. Normally Jason was calm and laid-back, which was part of the reason his students loved him. That, and he cracked them up regularly. In the classroom, humor came naturally to him. The downside to being an improv-er was when people found out that he did improv, they inevitably demanded that he say something amusing to them, and he was no good at being funny when ordered to. He wished he could bring some levity to the current debacle he found himself in, but he couldn't see anything funny about it.

“I'm going to the school board on this, I'm going to the superintendent, I'm going to the newspapers. I don't send my daughter to school so she can get filled up with a bunch of communist malarkey.” The cattle rancher shook his thick finger in Jason's face.

The enormous man stood up, put his cowboy hat on, and turned his waving finger toward the principal. “Don't think you've heard the last you're going to hear from me.”

The man stormed out, and Jason looked at the principal.
Thanks for sticking up for me.

The principal was a thin, sickly looking, watery-eyed man who hoped for nothing more than to quietly get to retirement age and get away from the students who scared him more and more every year.

“So what's going to happen?” Jason asked. “Are there going to be repercussions from this? I mean, I didn't do anything wrong.”

“I don't know what's going to happen, Jason, I really don't. In the meantime, just tone it down.”

“Tone it down? I'm just telling the kids the way it is.”

“You're supposed to be teaching biology, not all this political nonsense.”

Political? He wasn't being political; just honest.

“I'm not going to lose my job over this, am I?”

The principal just shrugged helplessly.

Jason left the principal's office and returned to his own tiny office. He had twenty minutes to calm down before he had to teach his next class. This was almost as bad as when the mandate had come down that if a biology teacher dared to mention evolution, they had to be sure to say “it's
only
a theory!” like it was as legitimate as a lose-weight, get-rich, cure-baldness pill from a mad scientist on the Psychic Network.

Jason sat at his desk, put his head in his hands, and took deep breaths.

6

Book Smart

A
t eleven
A.M.
, Ramiro got out of bed, showered, had his morning cigarette, and caught the bus to the bookstore where he worked in LoDo (Lower Downtown).

Ramiro had graduated
summa cum laude
in Philosophy despite being one of the laziest people his friends had ever known. He had an absolute inability to finish anything he started. He'd started writing dozens of novels, hundreds of essays, several plays, and numerous sketch comedy skits. All of them languished in various stages of incompleteness somewhere in his untidy room.

To his credit, though, Ramiro was the only one of them who'd had a serious relationship that lasted more than a year, and had in fact been seeing Nick for a whopping three years now.

Nick was a certified financial planner, a high-achieving, high-paid type, in contrast to Ramiro's laid-back, go-with-the-flow, I'll-make-just-enough-money-to-pay-for-cigarettes-and-my-share-of-the-rent ideology. Nick had blond hair and a slight build, also a contrast to Ramiro's dark features and broad build, thanks to genetics, to his Portuguese and Mexican ancestors, and not to any commitment to working out. In fact, as far as any of his friends knew, Ramiro had never seen the inside of the gym, and indeed, they were right.

Some of his friends thought maybe he had just way too many ideas and that was why he never finished anything. In any case, he was the smartest person any of them had ever known—ever. While his mother thought his intelligence was squandered working at a bookstore, he liked his life. He liked having time to write and to act and to hang out with his friends. He suspected that someday he'd go back to school and earn his Ph.D. in Sociology or English literature or something, but taking classes and writing a dissertation sounded like so much work, and he liked his life right now and just didn't have the energy to change anything just yet.

He did dream of being able to write full time, and he'd given the writing thing something of a shot. Chelsey had tried to team up with him once to write a pilot for a new sitcom. He'd had great ideas, but after three weeks of getting together for two hours a week, he'd made up an excuse about why he couldn't see her that week, then the next and the next, and with just fifteen pages written (though they were really, really good), the project had been abandoned. Chelsey knew he had more intelligence and talent than the other members of their group put together, but she also knew that if she wanted something to get done, she couldn't depend on him to do it.