This about sums it up

Raised By Wolverines, who has co-blogger authorship rights here but apparently is a lazy sack of poo and rarely posts (hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) sent me an email recently about two projects, each with a different agency, that he had been contacted about. One of them sounded great -- a project that allowed work from home, fairly long-term and good hours. Naturally, everything turned out to be not as advertised:

[An agency we both have worked for] contacted me early this morning about a two day, heavy hours project Thursday and Friday.  Maybe even work on Saturday.  I was thinking: "Cool.  Quick way to earn another $600."  At noon got the waiting on further word from client email.   At 2 pm, got the client does not need us email, we are sorry.
And just thirty minutes ago got an update from [a project manager at another agency we both have worked for].  The 3 month stay at home project is now a 4 week maybe you will get to work from home project. 
And then [the first agency mentioned that we both have worked for] sent me email and conflicts for long-term project starting Monday which has been postponed twice.  I sent it back and asked does this mean it's a go.  Response was the following: "It is still lined up to kick off on Monday.  Please know that we share any information as soon as it is provided to us."  Not exactly a ringing endorsement that the project will begin then.

This kind  of encapsulates why temping really fucking sucks. The money's not bad when you're actually working (at least if there's overtime, which is more and more unusual these days), but you can't count on anything. I hear young temps say they like the "flexibility," but as the above email demonstrates, the flexibility is all to the advantage of the agencies and the law firms they pimp for. For temps, it just means you have to be flexible because every time you talk to an agency, you have to remember Rule No. 1: they're lying. This is not my idea of a good thing.