Valley of the Shadow

While I'm waiting for my next assignment.from the agency (please, PLEASE hire this 61-year-old codger!), I found some notes I took while on an interesting assignment I worked on earlier this year.

It was just supposed to be a six-week assignment, but it ran more than 7 months, filling in and catching up the work until the already-hired permanent worker took over. An office administrator in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, (not the real name) an organization that handles organ and tissue donations. And we're not talking Wurlitzers and Kleenex, here.  I work with medical, scientific and instructional data, trauma cases, distressed families, and emergency workers.  I produced, for example, training manuals, compiled data reports which I extracted from medical charts, and mail-merge projects for donor families and promotional events. My lifetime of self-taught computer training paid off in a big way. Things I used to look forward to doing on other jobs were the things I now did routinely.

My office was a huge 16 x 16 cubicle in a corporate headquarters office complex. All the things that matter in office life, such as an electric stapler, my own computer with a flat-screen monitor, scanner/fax/laser printer and a big stack of Posty-notes - all the colors of the rainbow -  all there!  One wall of the office is a row of 8-ft high picture windows, overlooking a corporate version of a mini-marsh, complete with cat-tails and red-wing blackbirds.  It was such a very peaceful place to work.   My co-workers were all very pleasant to work with, and just as I suspected, as soon as I learned all of their names, I was re-assigned again by the agency.  Since the organization is on-call 24 hours a day, there are probably still people who work there that I've never met.

At any rate, I made lots of new friends, and at the end of the 7-months, they even held a good-bye pizza lunch for me in the conference room.  I'm confident that during my stay I made the agency look good, and used my bag of Excel tricks to perform my duties to the highest standard of standardness. .....And then I became a software tester for an office downtown.... That's why we're called Office Temporaries - an elite strike force that moves in and Gets the Job Done!

Thanks for listening and contributing. I'd love to hear from you.