Lately, I've been doing a lot of temporary work. When you're a lawyer, temporary work is called being a "contract attorney" which sounds a lot more prestigious than being a temp but isn't.

While being a temporary worker cannot compare to actual employment in terms of salary, benefits, respect, getting paid during lunch, and general happiness, there are a few advantages that temporary work has over regular, actual jobs, such as not having to come to work on time.

There are no interviews involved in doing temporary work. The way you get a job is to contact a person at temp agency, who will refer to themselves as a staffing liaison or a staffing account executive but who is really a person at a temp agency. They will refer to you as a "candidate" and will continue to refer to you as a candidate even if you've had the same temporary job for nine months. This is because it was easier to do that than coming up with another, more appropriate word, such as pathetic. After you make contact, you will have a five minute conversation with them about your background and how it perfectly fits with whatever mundane drudgery they have available. Then you will provide them with your resume, and they will insist that you come and talk to them even though both of you will known that neither of you has anything to talk about.

During the meeting they will ask you several questions that are designed to identify which candidates are likely to pull down their pants at work or lick other candidates. Since they will not go with you to the placement (this is what they call a job) you will have plenty of chance to pull down your pants once you get there.

Temporary work can be very difficult. For example, one job I had involved sorting papers, only the papers were electronic, so it involved shopping for taxidermy on the internet. The job was to sort papers into classifications which were provided to us by our on-site supervisor, who had previously sorted the electronic papers into different sub folders. After placing them into, other, different sub folders, we passed them to Full Time Employees who put them into different folders and I think, traded them for gold.

The first temporary job I had required me to sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement and consisted of recreating spreadsheets from printed documents to computerized Excel spreadsheets. This job was interesting because in addition to moving individual nine digit numbers with my eyes from regular printed pages into hundreds of fields on a computer database, we had to do so with poor lighting. It was never clear what the purpose of our labor was but I did get an opportunity to work for a kid who was six years my junior.

One job I had involved 100 young lawyers on a project that can best be described as "stupid." Because of the large number of people in our group, we were assigned a Project Liaison, who was different from the staffing liaison, but who also had bad hair. His name was Chris and his job involved sending us emails to let us know that we had to send him emails in which we would tell him what would be our preferred method of contact. Once we'd all responded, he send us another email whereby attempting to meet with each of us face to face, which was a process that took several weeks, owing to the fact that he was so busy reading responses to our emails.

When we finally met, I asked him when he thought the project would end and inquired of his ability to give us advanced warning when we were going to be out of work. He told me that while there were lots of things he could tell me, such as when to expect paychecks, and that we could not get a second microwave, there were other things that he may or may not know, and that when he knows them, he will not tell me the actual thing, but will be honest with me and tell me that there is something he can't tell me. I understood his code to mean that weeks before my demise he'd casually tell me there was something he couldn't tell me. As it turns out, I must have misunderstood him, or I might have accidentally mentioned in one of my emails that my preferred method of contact was talking to me when I wasn't around because I was canned along with 50 others with less than a full day’s notice.

As I think about my legal career so far I am mostly sad, and annoyed, but there is some part of me that is happy to have had the experience. When I figure out what part of me that is, I will cut it off, unless I need it to pull down my pants.