A L S O_ T O D A Y

Comics
Keith Knight: Highs and lows of the year

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - zen and the art of
employee maintenance

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE HAND FILING? OR, CAN THE BUDDHA HELP THE TEMP WORKERS OF THE WORLD?

BY CHRIS COLIN

Temping, by 10 o'clock, seems to pare itself into things. There are files, 382958239 through 3819834576-b, plus sub-folders. There are marks of a more permanent life, photos on the cubicle walls from the cubicle regular, now in Cancún. There is the cubicle itself, too flimsy to be stuffy, the much-maligned symbol of everything wrong in corporate America. There is the half-hearted realization that the cubicle's fine; it's just fabric and angles, after all. And for the recent college graduate, plucked from the library to a place of envelope licking, there is the abstract sense of something good getting left behind.

But also at 10, something happens. A thought arrives, a dogged stowaway from the classroom looking for air. The thought is Everythought for the recent grad -- an idea puffed up and recondite involving Heidegger and cubicles, or Woolf and bosses, maybe the meta-narration of data entry. It flurries in like thoughts do, all quickness and excitement, that feeling of being alive on a bike on a hill. Connections flash like a copy machine but, suddenly, as suddenly as it appeared, the bike vanishes behind a startling realization: I really ought to be filing.

If temping is anything, it's structured time to think about temping. Temps love nothing more than considering the nature of their non-career. Me, I've even learned stats: More young people -- and more college grads -- are punching the temp clock than ever before. Seventy-two percent of America's temp population is under 35, and the percentage of temps with a college degree has risen from 33 percent in 1994 to 42 percent in 1997, according to a study released in April by the National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services. What's more, one in five temps is currently enrolled in school. Why are recent grads so enamored of the unstable and short-lived? They're not, a 1997 Department of Labor survey reveals: 59 percent of all temps would prefer to have permanent, full-time work. So as a growing number of ex-students clamor to find temp jobs they'd rather not have, I wonder, between faxes and amid dictation, how this business can be made more palatable.

The day slows down for a while and I'm free to wonder more. With the rising popularity of a "blended work force" -- corporate America's cozy term for an office temped to the gills -- the structure of contingency work could settle itself permanently into the ex-student's life. More and more, temp culture is spilling out of the cubicle and into the world. And the Department of Labor's numbers aren't the only evidence of overarching discontentment here; the proliferation of temp zines -- Temp Slave, Urban Tempo, Temp Tales -- evinces a frustration that runs deeper than grumbling ennui. The nation's dispensable staff, indispensable in our new global economy, is poking around for a new way of being.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Applying the Zen mind to the novice office serf