Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [36]
I asked my struggling actor friends if they had any tips for making cash, and my friend Chris said, “Call this number and ask for Diane. Tell her that I sent you.” So I called the number and a cheery voice answered: “This is the Laurie Group!” It was the kind of voice that you imagine stewardesses in the seventies had and I thought, How come no one pretends to be that happy anymore?
I asked for Diane and she said, “Absolutely!” This was going to be much easier than I thought. Maybe she’ll bring me a soft drink and a warm towel. I spoke to Diane and she couldn’t have been more thrilled to get my call. She loved Chris, which was strong language, because I wasn’t even sure I loved Chris. I mean I loved Chris like Jesus loves all, but I didn’t love him more than others. I told her that I had recently graduated from college and was looking for a job.
She said, “Fantastic!” It was the best news she had heard all day: I had graduated from college!
Diane invited me to come in for an interview the next day. In the waiting room, I read the Laurie Group literature and discovered that the Laurie Group had originally been an all-women’s temp agency. They called their temps “Laurie Girls.” Just recently they had started using some guys. So they were “Laurie Girls and some guys.” Diane called me in for the interview and it went as well as the phone conversation. Before I left, they asked me to take a typing test. Now, typing is certainly not my forte. Over the years I had flirted with Mavis Beacon but we’d never gone all the way. When I only scored about forty-two words per minute, they weren’t thrilled with my score, but it was enough. They said they had an assignment for me the next day. It only paid eleven dollars an hour but it would get my foot in the door. I felt like Tom Hanks’s character in Big.
“Eleven dollars an hour?”
I had gotten my first real-world job. I was a Laurie Girl (and some guys.)
I showed up to an advertising firm the next day. The offices were in a forty-five-story building and I was given a desk in the basement.
How about floor two? Or three? Anything near the commissary?
No.
Basement. No windows. Not many people, really. But I had an overseer who showed me how to do data entry. Data entry is a fascinating job where you . . . type . . . in . . . data . . . that’s been . . . written on something else. You can press tab and jump from field to field, and you need to remember to capitalize proper nouns like people’s names and their streets. The first ten minutes of data entry fly by, because you’re really getting the hang of it. The remaining seven hours and fifty minutes go a lot more slowly, because you glance at the clock after you finish every entry.
Data entry is the white-collar equivalent of potato peeling. “Oh, you finished peeling all those potatoes? Well super, because we have a couple hundred more sacks of potatoes!”
I fell asleep with such regularity at this job that I developed a strategy for falling asleep while sitting up in the typing position. It was the closest my life had come to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and it worked. No one ever caught me sleeping. But one day I had been sleeping for a whole hour. I had slept so long that when I woke up I needed to surf the web as a stimulant to get riled up for some more hard-core data entry action. And as I was surfing the web, my overseer sneaked up behind me, looked at my screen, and said, “I caught ya! You’re checking your email.” I thought, You should have been here five minutes ago when I was unconscious. That would have been far more exciting.
I thought that would be the end of my Laurie Girl days, but it wasn’t. They called me the next week with a new job. A better job. An administrative assistant at a women’s magazine that paid fifteen dollars an hour. It was a three-day stint with potential for more if I did well. I went in and did my first two days, and I rarely saw my boss but I answered her phone and did anything