Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

When I am so lucky to do a bit of temping, I arrive, primed in appearance, and men check me out.

Since my assignments take me to different places, I get to be the new girl in the cube.

When you become part of a new group, everybody adjusts in some way.

Being a woman, I can tell which ones are drawn toward me. If you look closer, you can see which of my new women co-workers are not happy at all. You can learn a lot, just by watching. I find the psychology of office behavior fascinating.

Like in out-of-the-office relationships, employees form cliques and operate with a strict, unspoken code of membership. I’ve learned to avoid them, be friendly to everyone and feather my nest with the boss whenever possible.

But inevitably there’s a man who takes my arrival in the office as some kind of romantic challenge. If the head boss was checking me out, I might be available. But for everyone else, I’m just not that interested.

For my temp job, I’m sitting in a pretty nice cube. One of the walls is a window that overlooks other office buildings, but at least it’s on the tenth floor, so I get the feeling of being high up. There’s only two other walls—the adjoining cube walls. Other than that, I’m wide open.

When I’m toiling in my cube and men find interest in me, they always come from behind. If I’m deep in thought, my butt will jump a bit off the chair before I land back down and immediately swivel around.

Nothing ever comes of it, however. Just my fantasy that they’d ask me to do something other manipulate a spreadsheet, which I’m always obliged to do.

Every once in a while, when I need to take a cube break, I saunter to the copy room and fumble with all the buttons. I’m challenged when it comes to working the copy machine, but I eventually push enough buttons to figure it out or find a cute guy in the office to help. Anything, he says, to get them out of his cube.

Our conversations are brief and no deeper than a glaze of White-Out. Perhaps tomorrow, we’ll meet again, this time by the office elevator. Going down.