This country needs a paint job badly. So why should A-Temps be any different? Still I’m surprised to see how the mighty organization has folded—or took advantage to look as cheap as it really is.

I couldn’t craft a parody of the workcamp atmosphere of the New Employment any more than the honest bad teeth of A-Temps. Let’s walk inside.

Gone are the six or seven well-placed and corporate chic offices. Now there is but one—next to the 270 exit ramp, sandwiched in the kind of strip mall where you inevitably find a Chinese restaurant and a Check-Into-Cash.

The new arrangement is dingy. It looks, as it is, like three mismatched worktables—$29.99 at Staples—jammed into a fortressed foyer. A badly cut, imperfectly painted plasterboard fronter—a gated window like a doctor’s office inset—protects the butcher shop inside.

The kicker is a wall-mounted 12-inch TV set, turned up to blaring volume. It is on continuous loop, playing a stiffly-produced program on worker safety. I can barely hear the young fish-faced counter man, in his white shirt and black pants. “Two forms of ID” is what he wants out of you.

I can see a bunch of saddened middle-aged women behind him, but I couldn’t tell you what they are doing. Nobody’s whistling while they work, I’ll tell you that—though I confess that had they been, I wouldn’t have heard them over the videotape roar.

REMEMBER DON’T TWIST YOUR BODY WHEN LIFTING THIS CAN CAUSE INJURY

“What?”

Fishy is giving me further instructions. I can tell by his face this is a feature of his job, repeating over the boom. I wonder how he keeps his mind.

He tells me, “There’s a test in here; it’s based on the video tape and common sense. If you miss more than six questions, we have to put a hold on your account and you can’t reapply for six months. It takes about an hour.”

“Are you serious?”

He is.

Sounds like jackassery to me. Am I going to get smarter in six months? Am I going to bone up on Workplace Safety in six months?

I’m already souring. I’m squeezing in with the other sausages. I open the thick application file. WARNING: If the application file is ever wider than two fingers of whiskey, walk on out.

The first page is a release authorizing A-Temps to extract wages from you to pay for your background check, fingerprinting, etc. Think $50 a pop. Also, they want to sell you steel-toes shoes, goggles—anything for warehouse wage slavery. Think $25 here and there.

It’s the company store!

What it all boils down to: It’s a Buyer’s Market, and what it is that’s on Clearance is You. This is a company fat, dopey and happy. Being employed by them is a privilege. If they ask you to wear a carnation up your arse, you better ask what color. A-Temps is not really looking for help; they’ve got more than they need; so all of a sudden they have standards.

So I sign the goddam paper and put on my Mark of the Beast and set it aside. What next? That test.

I’ve been in the security racket for the last five years, including being in management. I’ve reviewed workplace safety/ bloodborne pathogen tapes until they were running out of me in streamers. But there are terms and sharp corners in this piece of shit that I’ve never heard of.

“Excuse me, what day of the month is this?” Dude asks.

AND REMEMBER WORKPLACE SAFETY IN THE END IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY

I tell him, but I’m thinking, If you haven’t come prepared as much as that, you might as well go home now.

I check a few easy answers and try to watch the tape.

A woman comes in piping at the top of her lungs. “You all got anything? It’s been two years since you called me.”

Wow! Even I, leery of the follow-up call, would have checked up or moved on by now…

Fishface is abruptly in seventh heaven, renting cloud nine. With all the authority of telling you it’s going to be an extra couple of minutes on those fries, he says, “Well, then that’s about the time for you to fill out a new application and reapply again.”

“You got any customer service?”

Her I can hear. He shakes his head.

“You got any cashier positions? No? What is it, just warehouse?”

AND REMEMBER BLOOD-BORNE PATHOGENS MUST BE TREATED WITH UNIVERSAL PRECAUTIONS

I can’t hear his reply, but I’m putting it all together. Fits in with the twenty-five dollar steel-toed boots and the fifteen-dollar goggles. It’s all fucking industrial. Pressing aluminum for seven dollars an hour—that gig.

I’m sitting uneasily. I missed whatever was on that tape. Was that the part with the golden six questions?

Then I pull out another test. There are about forty math problems, six-figure additions—the only six figures anybody ever saw at A-Temps.

I scooched my chair back. “Excuse me,” to the date-asker.

I fold the piece of paper with my social security MotB into my tidy faithful little case.

Fishface is surprised to see me back so soon. I hand over the file.

“Thanks. You can scrap this.”

He finally understands what has happened when I’m going out the door. He probably couldn’t hear me over

IF YOU FIND A SITUATION YOU ARE UNSURE ABOUT REPORT IT TO YOUR SUPERVISOR

Same old bad habit. You can mark me down as a bad machine, one that does not play well with others.

It is raining now as I cross the dirty parking lot at Beechwold Crossing and I feel almost clean, my ears still ringing with that shrill authoritarian voice which reminds me, whatever happens, in the end, is my responsibility.