VITAL STATISTICS
Dreamer: Helen
Date: Aug. 20, 2000
Title: The Metal-Eating Temp
I was working for MHANYS, but our offices were in the ground floor of a large historic house in Albany around the Dove and Spring Street area - not too far from where it is now.
We had just hired a new temp receptionist who happened to be dumb as a post. My desk was near hers, and when I came back from doing photocopies I found that many of my paperclips and some tiny screws were missing. I asked the temp about it, but she denied knowing anything. I came back to her desk a little while later and found the big coffee can where we kept all our loose nails, screws, nuts, bolts, etc. on it, and she was nibbling from it like it was a bowl of cocktail nuts.
I went to talk to her about it, but she just said that she had to eat metal. It happened that I had taken a job in Scotland to be a social worker/investigator which started that afternoon, so I just left without coming to a conclusion with the temp - who was also a terrible worker besides; she didn't answer phones, she didn't distribute mail, she didn't make copies; she did nothing but attempt to type the same letter over and over, badly.
My new job was in Scotland (which was located way up Central Ave. past the OTB) which was very reminiscent of Trainspotting, except hopeless and depressing. One of the people I was sent to investigate was a woman whose son's father had been shot dead by the police. The son turned out to be the boy who did handyman work around MHANYS - a good kid named Algy - and his mom turned out to be MHANYS' current lousy temp.
After the shooting the city fell all over itself to give the kid presents, and take him to movie premiers and such, trying to look like good guys. I had to investigate the complaints of the neighbors in the boys's apartment building that somebody was stealing their mail-order shipments of canned olives.
I arrived at this run-down, project-housing type apartment building, and began questioning the neighbors. They told me that they had gone door-to-door asking who stole the mail-order shippments of canned olives and discovered it was the boy's mother, the lousy temp. She admitted stealing the olives, but said that she "really liked them" so she should be allowed to have them. The neighbors said that once the city started giving her son all kinds of things she started to feel entitled to anything she wanted, too. I realized I would have to quit my job so I could walk from Scotland back to Albany and warn MHANYS before she started eating metal desks and other expensive stuff and start costing them real money.
I reached MHANYS and rang the bell to be let in. The temp could see me through the glass. She wasn't more than five feet away. She heard me yelling at her and she didn't move - didn't even blink. Finally Jean K. (a real person I used to work with at the Schenectady Museum) came all the way from the back of the room to answer the door and let me in. As she led me back to the administrative offices, she said to the temp, "You remember what Joe told you, 'From time to time-'" and in unison we both shouted, "YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO DO SOME DAMN WORK!"
As I arrived, Joe (the head of MHANYS), had just left for a meeting, so I had to tell David K. about the metal-eating temp. But Will C. (a real person from a completely different context) was also there talking to him, and I didn't feel right divulging just how incompetent and what a menace the temp truly was in front of an outsider. I was hoping Will would finally leave, but then it also occurred to me that it would sound pretty weird for a former employee to be accusing a temp of eating metal.
I woke up before I could tell David the whole story.
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