The summer before my Senior year of college, I went and applied at a temp agency called Adecco. When I went in that day, I was hoping to be placed in clerical jobs. The recruiter said it didn't look like I was qualified of any clerical jobs after looking at my resume. This struck me as odd since at the time I was an English major and spent most of my educational career writing and editing plus I was completely capable of filing, alphabetizing, most of the skills you'd associate with clerical office jobs. The recruiter then asked me if I'd be interested in taking their light industrial placement test. I said sure, though in retrospect I probably should have passed. While the placement test had questions which asked about identifying UPCs, item numbers and bar codes, the job I was eventually given had nothing to do with any of these. I felt as if I had been mislead severely.
I was assigned a temp job at a place called Apex Logistics. It was a large warehouse and the job was 4 days a week from, if memory serves me correctly, 5:00 until 11:00. And what did they have me doing? Loading trucks with mail-order merchandise, especially a multitude of packages ordered from QVC. And no, I didn't know this would be what I was doing until after I came in the first night. So here I am, it's late July, I'm incredibly out of shape and I'm working in a warehouse loading boxes and packages into the back of a truck for 6 hours. This. Was. Hell. On top of this, I was the only person working in my section that had a firm grasp of the English language. The rest of the men working with me where of various Hispanic works and spoke Spanish or, on the rare occasion they needed to tell me something, broken English.
Since I had no idea what this job entailed, I was unprepared for the working conditions. When I left the building that night, I was severely dehydrated. There was a water cooler in the section where I was working, but I obviously wasn't able to make enough trips to it to stay hydrated. I legitimately was unable to spit when I left. It was easily the worst night of my life.
Despite all of this, I decided I'd stick to it and see the job out until the end of the week since that's when I imagined how long my assignment would last. When I went back to work on Wednesday, the first thing I decided to do was find the supervisor just to make sure how long my assignment was. He told me that the temporary assignments are usually ongoing with intent to hire full-time. Yeah, this was not going to work for me. Not just because I'd be going to back school in about a month, but because there is no way I wanted to make a career out of working in a warehouse loading mail-order merchandise into trucks. I know people joke about the uselessness of an English degree, but I knew I was better than this and destined for something better.
Thursday night, most of us were taken off truck loading duty and instead assigned to wrap skids full of boxes in cling wrap. And, as an added bonus, we were told that we would not be dismissed until every skid was wrapped satisfactorily despite the shift switch that came at 11:00. So I was there until well after midnight before being told to go.
So, remember earlier when I said I intended to see stick around until the end of the week? Yeah, this was the night I said "Fuck that" and changed my mind. Friday morning I called Adecco and told them I wished to be removed from that assignment. The representative I spoke to told me this would count as a "voluntary quit" and I might be unable to receive future job assignments from Apex. That was fine with me. I didn't want to deal with the strains of working there any longer.
A week or so later, I got a call from Adecco saying they had another potential job assignment for me. It was a 3rd shift job cleaning industrial paint containers. I couldn't say "No" fast enough. That was the last time Adecco contacted me and not long after that I got a job as a cashier at Weis Market. I think I'm done with temp agencies, or, at the very least, the ones that offer me jobs described as "light industrial".
