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Friday, August 17, 2012

8-17-12 Survival Jobs for Writer-Musicians -- Starter Job #181 (Working Temp in NYC: Faxing Documents for The Man, Part 2)


“A hundred twenty pages?!” The admin in the receiving office scoffed. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. They need it faxed? They can’t just get it mailed?”

I checked back with my exasperated temp boss. “If I wanted it mailed, I’d have said to mail the sucker. Just fax it,” he ordered, with a dismissing wave of his pudgy, manicured hand.

I called back the other assistant. “Yup, he definitely wants to fax it to your office. Is that all right? Is this a good time?”

The other assistant groaned, “That’ll keep all the other faxes from coming in, so I’ll give you another fax number to send to. And, I have to check if we have enough fax paper. Once you start sending, that will take hours. . .”

I groaned sympathetically back with the other assistant. At any rate, us two assistants watched over our respective fax modems like mother birds watching their eggs hatch. . .  we had to make sure the transmission was successful, each and every page of the 120 pages. . . because each page took about a minute, and then occasional machine jams occurred, so in the end, that damn fax took almost three hours to send.

The next day, my temp boss said, “That document you faxed yesterday? Trash it. We’re doing a new draft.”

That was one of those times, as a temp, I was fit to be bound and gagged. How much more wasteful and non-insightful could those bosses be? Well, look at the corporate history of one of many big business failures, like Lehman Brothers. . .

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