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Thursday, June 9, 2011

Is the good news bad news?

When things get busy in TempTown, we generally view that as a good thing. It's easy to find work, nobody sits at home for long between projects, and life is good.

Or is it? The problem with lots of work in TempTown is that agencies will hire people like Moby and the Hobo just to fill seats. Sure, they got a law degree at some point, and this job isn't exactly rocket science, but guys like this are part of why temps have a bad rep. This problem raised its head for me recently in the bathroom. As I stepped up to the urinal, I noticed that the guy to my right looked very familiar.  (Yes, I just confirmed that the author of this blog is male -- like anybody ever thought that "Ernest Hemingway" was a pseudonym for a chick. But I digress.)

This guy wasn't just familiar -- he was infamous. He was The Bridge Troll. The Bridge Troll was infamous for two reasons -- he looks like a troll who sleeps under a bridge, and he is incompetent even by temp standards.

Let me explain. The Bridge Troll is about 5'6", squat like a fire hydrant, balding on top with a comb-over do. He wears glasses, which always look like he rides a motorcycle to work through bug-infested areas without any kind of face guard. Seriously, smashed mosquitoes on the lenses. He appears to have slept in his clothes, maybe for the last month or so. No way is he not homeless.

Alas, he is even less competent than his appearance suggests. Presumably, the man can offer proof that he graduated from law school, but that only proves he went to a law school that prided itself on its graduation rate, not on the quality of its graduates. He raises incompetence to an art form.

The last project on which I worked with The Bridge Troll, I was on the QC (quality control) team -- we would check to make sure that the temps were not out in left field. It quickly became clear to the QC team that The Bridge Troll was coding a document, and then using a function of the review program to code the next  200 or 300 documents the same way. This is known as "mass coding." Most systems won't allow it anymore, but this was back in the day and is why the system designers changed things. Part of the problem, of course, was the Troll was coding the first document wrong, then coding the next 200 documents the same way. But that isn't the worst part.

Unfortunately, the law firm running the project was offering incentives for speed. They were holding a raffle at the end of the project -- the more documents you reviewed, the more entries into the raffle you would receive. Quality? Not an issue. So The Bridge Troll was mass coding, easily winning the daily raffle race. The QC team was going crazy fixing this guys' crap, but in the end, he won the raffle. He got $2,500 for being the worst document coder in the history of mankind. If he looked at a single document, I am the fucking pope. And he made more money off that project than I did. Go figure.

In any event, I was standing there, certain that The Bridge Troll, whom I had not seen on a project in four years, was at the urinal next to me. This is key -- the belief that The Bridge Troll was too awful to find work gave me hope that the profession could be saved. Thinking he might be next to me, on a project, was not good.

Unfortunately, we were in the bathroom. There is a very limited time frame in which you can look at the guy peeing next to you. The dude next to me was heavier than The Bridge Troll, but who hasn't gained weight over the last four years or so? I couldn't look for too long without appearing creepy. Even The Bridge Troll will deck you if he thinks you're looking at his junk, and you'll deserve it.

So, bottom line, I don't know right now if the market is so hot that The Bridge Troll finally got hired again. I hope not.

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