We Fingertip Our Tarantella

No, it's not the actual work itself that will kill you - it's the people. Temping is like playing a part in an open-ended run of No Exit, where you become committed, by necessity, to your part because it may never end. Art / Life being equal (even in terms of sheer man hours - I worked 12 of them yesterday) it makes no difference if the character is walking down to the corner buying a pack of smokes, or if the man is himself onstage in front of some other audience that starts to feel like everyday tinitus - always present, alien but internal, ringing humming buzzing. But of course, when you start to notice it (the tinitus or the people) it becomes strange, multi-layered - the buzzing isn't just a pure sine wave - overtones ring out and curve to fit the shape of the room. Same with temping with other people essentially - their Temp Sounds just kind of pop out. No conversation for hours, then suddenly heartbreaking talk of career number three and a caesura between long term, monogamous relationships, and age slowly creeping beyond the point of marketability, and a less-than-adequate grasp on the fine points of Excel - and it's like you've entered the Temporary Unconscious, all archetypes acted out specifically and precisely according to themselves. These people that I temp with (and here it's not like I've got some totalizing knowledge of their lives that they themselves lack - if they could see the conversation as a conversation and not an interested sad-life-story agon, well then they'd come to the same conclusion, or rather be presented with everything in all its bare self-evidence), they have the trashed marriages, and the BA but somehow no prospects, and the bad computer skills, and come overdressed for a job that doesn't really even require a tie, much less a full-on suit. And the whole thing is fairly heartbreaking - a) because it's happening right in front of you (or really in your peripheral vision, because you, like me, cannot bring yourself to take your eyes off the screen and actually watch the conversation happen) and b) because inevitably you must ask, and you are a deficient human being if you don't, "WILL THAT BE ME."

It already is.