Must think she's chairwoman of the board

 On a new project not real interesting in most respects but we had an incident the other day that can only be described as Bizarre, with a capital B. That rhymes with C. And that stands for Crazy Temp. OK, enough Music Man. I love show tunes, but I digress.

One morning recently, at the beginning of the workday, I was sitting in our workroom with only one other temp with me. We basically were minding our own business and getting about the business of clicking. Without warning, in walks some chick, total stranger, pushing a chair. Chair had wheels, people, she wasn't working that hard. And looked like she never had.

So she launches into this long, bizarre explanation about how she and some other temps had been on a project in this room before us and they got shut down but now they had a new project and they had been promised that they would have the same room and everything and could she just exchange this shitty chair for the really good chair over there that she had during the last project and -- SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Fortunately, I said that with my eyes, not my lips. The other person in the room looked at this person and said,  "I don't know what to tell you." I knew exactly what to tell her, though, and that was GET THE FUCK OUT. Again, I used my eyes, not my lips, and she got the message. She turned around, still pushing the chair, saying "We lost our office, we lost our computers, we lost our chairs."

I really wanted to explain to her that none of those things were actually hers.  Temp, oddly enough, is short for temporary. Clearly, she doesn't get that, since she spent the rest of the day trying to take stuff out of the room my project is in. When we started to get hostile, she sent a surrogate to get a table. A table. This poor schmo walks in, asks if he can take this table. Small, like an end table. Not sure why she wanted it so bad. I explained that he was unlikely to leave the room in one piece if he tried to take the table. Principle had come into play, after all. That, finally, was the end of the madness.

There is no telling what leads to this kind of madness. I've said before, all a temp has is his chair, but I have never suggested you could keep the same chair from project to project. Apparently, this woman is an agency favorite and is rolled over from one project to the next. I suppose that could lead to a sense of entitlement. On the other hand, how is somebody too stupid to understand "temporary" competent enough to keep getting rolled over from one project to the next? Something to think about.