I gotta a job making money for the man, put the chicken in the bucket with the soda pop can.

I have had two jobs in “the industry” since I came to L.A.. They were both short lived, temp job type deals. At the first one I worked for one of the big studios at some satellite office, so I never got to go on the lot. Every day security gave me a bunch of bullshit when I tried to come in to work and I would have to go to the pay phone (I didn't have a cell phone yet) and call my agency. I was supposed to answer a phone for this executive. The only thing was she liked to answer her own phone. So, I only had to answer it while she was at lunch and it never rang then. Every day around 4pm, she would bring me a one page document to fax. I think she felt bad for me. I was probably sending blank sheets to her mom's house or something. My day consisted of trying to hide in my itchy polyester clothes so no one would notice that I didn’t do anything. It was oddly stressful. I would rather have been working. I sat in an almost empty cubicle. It had an electric typewriter and not much else. I did not have a computer, so no solitaire, no email no nothing. I read the complete works of Dorothy Parker in a week.

The second job I was working for one of the big industry papers. I was placed in the editorial department. Every morning when I came in, all the major newspapers would be lying on my desk with certain articles circled. It was my job to cut them out then photocopy several sets for the morning editorial meeting. It was to be my only peaceful time of the day. After that task was accomplished, the phones would be turned on. When the temp agency called me, they asked if I had ever worked with multi-lined phones. I said yes. I really should have asked how many multi is. I was thinking it was like five or six. Turns out it was forty. And they rang all the damn time. They never stopped until they were turned off at five. They were split between me and another woman, twenty lines each. Still, that is a lot. We never spoke to each other or took breaks. People would call, all agitated, yelling things like, “whose Kate Moss’s agent?” I really didn’t know anything about the industry and I have to admit I would occasionally “get cut off” from the person asking the hard to answer question. We got about twenty minutes for lunch and maybe one bathroom break all day. I was too inexperienced to call anyone out on the legalities of this. When my lunch break came, I would eagerly exit the building, lighting the first of three or four cigarettes I could suck down in twenty minutes. I would walk down the street to the 7-11 and get a hot dog and a soda. Once, I was walking through the parking lot and I saw a car that had been abandoned in front of the store while the owner went in to quickly buy chips, smokes, rubbers or whatever. He had forgotten to set the parking brake, but had locked the car up tight. It was rolling back into the very busy intersection. All these people came running to try to stop it. I remember standing there watching it drifitng forebodingly while all this anonymous good intention tried to make things right, and thinking, “yeah, entropy is a bitch”. But, they did stop it.

I got to actually go onto a studio lot the other day for an actual meeting. After the meeting, I did "get lost" a little on the way to my car. I think I have pretty much earned the right to wander a bit.