In For A Penny

I have been temping for the last couple of weeks so I can pay my bills. Since I am union and not able to get much extra work, I have had to go back to working in an office, which is not what I want to do. But, you gotta do what you gotta do.

The first job I had was working for a company that ships pallets of stuff all over the L.A. area. They were going to be audited and they needed someone to go through ALL of their files for the past 6 months. Invoices, shipping receipts, employee files, ALL of it. So I spent most of my time looking through files to make sure they had signatures, dates, insurance forms, shipping receipts, and employee tax forms. Needless to say I was bored out of my mind and had to drink a LOT of coffee to stay awake.

The office I worked in was small, only 5 women were in it, and they were the Accounts Receivable department. The only good factor of this job was a woman named Penny. Penny is a Chinese woman. She came over from China when she was a little girl and had a very stereotypical accent. I don’t think she was too bright either, because she had a difficult time figuring out things in certain situations. Here is one of those incidents that I had with her. Because part of what is funny about it is her accent, I will type it as it sounded to me. You should read it out loud to fully get the idea.

I needed a notebook to keep track of problems that I came across. I was told to ask Penny for a notebook.

B: Hey Penny, do you have a notebook?

(Penny WHIPPED her head around like I had snuck up on her)

P: Wha? Oh, ya shoo. Ahhh, dis is the fi cabinet and you take da fies and you jus take da fies and you put dem in aphabetica orda and den you take dem and you, well afta you put the fies in dem you jus, ahh, well you jus take the otha fies and you, you know, you keep dem in orda, but be sure to jus make sure dat the fies are in orda when you put dem in da cabinet.

B: Uhh, okay. Well I have to do something first, so can I have a notebook?

P: Oh, a notebook. Ya shoo. Here, ahhh, take dis and den ahhh, jus keep track of what you want to in it, jus wri on each page, den when you aah dun, jus rip da page and put in trash. Okay?

B: Sure.

The other thing about Penny is that she will give me jobs to do and then a couple of days after I do it, she will come back and tell me one CRUCIAL instruction that she forgot to tell me that would have changed the way I did the job. I usually had to go back and do it again or just tell her that I did it the way she wanted so I wouldn’t have more work to do. She was also unable to get the printer to work almost every day, and would tell other people that they broke it, even though it was usually a paper jam.

So Penny kept me entertained almost every day as I waded through miles of paper work.

I hope I did a good job, because if I didn’t and they have a bad audit, I could be working with Penny again.