Day 11: Temporary worker to permanently dead

When all is said and done, I think I will be able to write a book on my temping experiences, and all the embarrassing mishaps that have gone along with them. Tentative title: How I was almost crushed to death by a moving file cabinet.

After one of the worst mornings of my life, involving a wrong bus, wrong stop, wrong rain, I finally got to my new temp job two hours later. The people were very nice and understanding, however, and had tons of stuff or me to do, which I prefer. One of them was filing.

We made our way to the filing cabinets, which from my desk I thought were giant speakers because of these big, black circles in the middle. Strike one. But once we got in the room, they looked just like a safe that use a wheel to open. Strike two. They are actually shelves full of files that you could move left and right to get to, thus fitting double or triple the files in a space. So today I filed in a room of moveable filing cabinets. (Picture from Google.)

I had a little too much fun moving them back and forth, delighting in trying to crash them into each other. (Which they don't do, they just move the next one along.) I liked that I could sit on the floor in between them and no one could see me. Now, I wasn't trying to flake on my work. I had worn new shoes, with the slightest heel, and my feet were killing me. I sat down for just a minute to rest the poor dears, when one of the shelves started closing in on me. Very slowly at first, but then rather quickly so I had to hop up and push it back.

My life flashed before my eyes as I could picture the headline, "Poor, jobless UNC grad crushed to death in filing room tragedy." And then all I could see was that scene from one of the Star Wars films where the heroes are almost crushed to death in a trash compactor. And I just had a feeling there was going to be no Han Solo or Chewbacca to save me. Thus today has two new things in one: filing with moveable cabinets, and almost dying because of them.