Working Temp Jobs

          I started my temp jobs with Kelly.  I don’t recall any jobs through Kelly that weren’t banquet involved.  What a letdown.  NOT the field I was looking for.  There was one assignment I’d been given to insert flyers and advertisements together. There was a large group of us who got the job done in less than two and a half hours.  We got paid for four.

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          The only other temp agency I worked for was Adia – which later became Adecco.  The name changed when I was doing secretarial work for DCFS.

          Now there’s a trip.  Working for the state.  Department of Child and Family Services.  Felt more like Dysfunctional Communication for Society.  I really was not at all thrilled about how agents or clients were being treated.

          My “job” was to assist a secretary who evidently had a huge work load.  She was great at training me – but would often send me to other departments as her work load was not as horrific as Adia was led to believe.  I had been told I’d be working for two months?  I can’t remember.  They never told me to stop coming.  And I could actually walk to the location.  I was there for a little over a year.

          Mostly I did filing and copied case loads for adoptions – which is NOT the department I was hired for.  But it was a paycheck.  I was great at my job.  I became a lot more familiar with the copy machine than I would have liked people to know.  I became known as the “copy queen”.

          At first I copied everything exactly how I found it, being certain to return everything back exactly how I found it.  As I got more familiar with what the case loads contained, and all the duplicate copies, and all the fax covers – I must say that I did a complete turnaround on my case copies and was able to “clean up” in the original file.

          One day I was told that they really couldn’t afford to keep me on anymore.  And that was to be expected really – Hey I had already worked at least ten to fourteen months longer than expected date and so it didn’t seem that big of a deal to me.

          I was invited to apply to work on with DCFS directly.  Oh, right.  I saw how their employees were moved from location to location at the drop of a hat.  If I wanted to work downtown Salt Lake, I would apply downtown Salt Lake.  If I wanted to work in Magna, I would apply to the outskirts of where I actually lived.  But I wasn’t going to start a job in Murray so that I could be relocated with less than a full day’s notice.  No thank you.  With the temp agency, I had the option of saying, “sorry, no.  Doesn’t work for me.”

          There were a few other assignments I had with Adia – mostly warehouse work.  I packed auto parts at NAAPA and bycicle safety kits with another company and binder kits with Franklin and NuSkin products with a packaging company. 

          A lot of breakage of machines.  A lot of wasted time.  I didn’t mind the warehouse assembly lines.  I preferred clerical work.  Minus the phones.

          I was called back to DCFS (through Adia) in less than a month after they let me go.  Reception work, answering phones.  Hated that.  I actually don’t like phones all that much.  I find them necessary at times.  But overall I find them very bothersome.

Didn’t do that for long.  They had me as a multi-tasker.  I was given a pager so that I could prioritize who was important and who could wait.  What a trip.  I was a temp with my own show to run.  I was there for another year, I think.  And then they had to let me go again.

          Funny stories about DCFS:  I was writing a letter that needed the approval of the administrator.  He totally misses the point of the letter and harps all over the letterhead (as if I really had anything to do with that) though it was understandable.  

 All the letters that I had sent out, in all that time, had been on the same letterhead.  Two other mayors had been in office since the one listed on the letterhead.  I found amusement in it.

          There was another time I had left DCFS of my own free will.  The state came up with a brilliant plan – state owned buildings would be less costly than privately owned buildings (what a grand concept, huh?) and therefore all state employees would be relocated to state buildings.  Not me.  I still worked for Adia.  Didn’t care for the new location.

          Within a week, the employees were back to the “privately owned” as the state owned building had to be condemned.  Our tax dollars hard at work.  It makes one be proud to be a Utahan.

         

          When I was called to work with DCFS again it was a building located right next door to Adia.  I was there for about three weeks when Adia merged with another temp agency providing them with the new name Adecco. 

As a “secretary” I was making the most money I had ever made in my entire life, and I wasn’t doing a darn thing to earn it.  When I arrived, the girl I worked with had me searching through clip art to create a flyer for an upcoming pizza party.  Seriously? 

I was literally scrounging for work.  Sending out emails.  Nobody was utilizing my skills.  I resorted back to the building I had come from.  Does anybody have any work over there?  They did.  They would send it to me, and I would send it back.  Come on.   I would have just rather just remained in the first building where I had started.

I enjoyed getting to know the agents who actually worked at Adecco and were the ones finding workers to send to locations.  They seemed professional and on the ball.  That was then.

When I tried to rejoin the force just last year, I wondered what it is that is keeping them in business.  Those finding jobs do NOT communicate with one another – certainly not with me.  It was such a hassle just finding the place too.  I think my experiences with Adecco are so in the past.

Overall I did enjoy the temp experience (with last year’s exception) because I did have the option of picking and choosing.  But I wasn’t always thrilled with the commute for some assignments.