(1)
No benefits at the new jobby-job. And it�s not so much the lack of benefits as the embarrassment at having been caught out hoping for them, being credulous enough to believe the person who advised me they�d be forthcoming. Also the manner in which I learned that the adviser had been wrong, that is to say having been told so, smugly and in a loud voice, by B, who works in the same office in which my official tenure ended at 5 pm today. She waylaid me on my way back to my desk from the Ladies� and challenged, "So I hear you got a new position already." Yes, I said, I�m thrilled about it. B asked me what its classification was, and, based on what I�d heard, I told her. "That�s *wrong*," said B, and I could feel her sort of warming up in a way that made me instinctively alarmed, "that�s not right at all." I was silent, dread rising. B: "Don�t you have anything to say? Don�t you want to know what that means?" Me (trying to be pleasant): "What?" B (crowing): "No benefits! I bet you thought you were getting benefits, huh? Well, you ain�t." The really awful part is that before that takedown occurred, I�d already started feeling anxious on account of all the people in the temp office who had been coming by to congratulate me on the new position and its excellent timing. Each well-wisher would ask me what I was going to be doing, and I�d name it, and then my inquisitor would follow up by asking how long the position was going to last. Until sometime in June, I�d say. And then suddenly the congratulation would evaporate and in its place the humidity of pity and presumptuous behalfness � there�s a blast from the past, eh? � would blow in and all of a sudden the person who moments ago might have been regarding me with new respect because the IT job is dope was instead looking at me as if I were Oliver Twist. Then: "Oh, no!" � and a false for-my-sake (which of course is the galling part) brightening � and "Well, maybe you�ll be able to find something else after that, maybe something else will come up, right? It�s important to stay hopeful, isn�t that true?" And, waaaah! Look, people, I�m going to get to work this difficult, respectable, high-profile job at which a person could reasonably argue that I am a longshot to bring home success, and that�s the kind of challenge I love best of all. I�d never admit this to you, people, but I haven�t had health insurance or any benefits whatsoever for going on three years, and do you see any oozing sores, am I a victim of pestilence? No I am not: I�m pretty much just like you. And, slinking back to the temp desk after getting bitch-slapped by Belinda � and had spoken so loudly that it�s likely the whole office heard her; in any case that was the end of the congratulatory drop-bys � I started thinking about how different my experience is from that of the people in the office, how different my expectations are. Remember, this is a government agency. Once you�re in, you�re in for life, and to get fired you�d have to do something along the lines of raping someone on the job and then filing a false overtime report about it. The benefits are unbelievably lush even for some temporary classifications, and everyone seems simultaneously grim and cheerful about their particular jobs � they are at best indifferent about what they do, but every day the work is done is one day closer to that magical pension payoff, which many people in the office are obsessed with to the point of calculating their investment level weekly. In the temp office it�s a culture of, like, meta-jobs, twenty years apiece of different flavors of paper-pushing. I�m so torn about this �

(1a) On the one hand, let�s take B, for instance. She is an unskilled worker with a high-school education, open contempt for what�s a fairly liberal dress code, and a lack of interest in providing either internal or external customer service. She is slow-moving and rude and has such lazy enunciation that one has to listen carefully to understand what she�s saying. If the government agency hadn�t taken B under its wing, she�d probably be working at McDonald�s. Because it has, she�s making bank, she owns a house, she�ll be taken care of forever, she�s diversifying the middle class, from the perspective of citizenship she�s kind of a model citizen. I have to put my politics where my mouth is and recognize that all in all, these are probably good things.

(1b) But at the same time, my simmering resentment! And the horrible self-doubt and second-guessing it engenders! And there is no rationalizing the fact that B was a bitch to me, and anyway what's the big deal about wearing something other than jeans to work? Wednesday, the morning before I had the IT interview, Pam called me into her office and told me that she and the BB�s Smithers had been talking and they�d love for me to take over the job of G, who is being promoted. It would have been a one-year temp contract with full fat benefits and, after that, a no-brainer opportunity to apply for the position permanently as the incumbent. I told her that I was honored that they thought so well of me but that I had real reservations about how administrative G�s position was, how she was essentially an uber-secretary. Pam surprised me then by saying Oh no no no, if you wanted to do it we�d make sure that the job req was rewritten and the administrative responsibilities got transferred to Faxy Lady, we all recognize that your talents go way beyond that. For a few hours I felt rather full of myself that Pam was willing to fight for me like that, I thought, Hmm, maybe I could even negotiate a better salary. But then I realized that G�s whole freakin *job* is administrative, that excising the secretarial parts would amount to evisceration and death and no job at all. I asked myself whether G�s job was something I�d feel good about myself naming when it came time at a party, say, for so-what-do-you-do, and the answer was Hell no, and I decided not to think about it further until after I�d heard back from IT, because maybe then I�d decide it would do as a backup. Then IT said yes, and there it was. What I hate, now, is how the reaction of the would-be congratulators and of the fuck-you-tastic B is giving me second thoughts, making me wonder whether I should have sloughed off difficult-respectable-challenging in favor of grim administrative cheer and the graspable brass ring of the first rung to pension heaven. WWMMD? No, that�s too easy and self-congratulatory. I want to have earned it. But then again� OK, Steve, who you may already know has an eager nose for the apocalyptic especially when the environment or class are concerned, was talking a few weeks ago about how he imagines the U.S. of A. will look in 20 years or so: one group of people driving around in air-conditioned Hummers and the other living in boxes without access to any social services. Perspective is everything, so to me, obviously, the great divide has less to do with money and consumer goods than health insurance. Am I never going to have health insurance for the rest of my life? Well, at this rate and in this economy, maybe not. Not unless, perhaps, I score a belly-of-the-beast job like B has, unless I suck it up and start pushing that paper.

(2)
And then I went out to dinner with Steve last night and here�s news, he�s decided that moving to New York is no longer Plan B. He has promoted it to Plan A and is going to start looking for a job there and earnestly hopes that I will do the same. He acknowledges that it will take him much longer to find a good resume-building job there while maintaining a Seattle HQ, maybe ten times as long, but it�s New York, home of the Flatiron Building, so it is worth it. Ten times several weeks is one thing; ten times two and a half years is another one entirely. So dinner last night, which I�d � naively? � thought would be all happy-day-are-here-again, turned out instead to be all about shock and fresh anxiety; I saw a life in which I was working stressfully hard all day at the IT job then coming home to spend hours online trolling and sending wheedling e-mails to potential employers in Manhattan. A week ago, we�d talked about it, and I felt like the situation was well defined. And, get this, he still wants to buy a house in Seattle, but to rent it out for three or four years while living "very lean" in New York to cover mortage + NYC rent expenses, notably by living in a less nice apartment than we otherwise would. Hello? Is this mike ON?! I don�t even know where to start with this one. I�m not going to move to New York to live in a roachhole and work some shitty (and, it goes without saying, benefitless) admin job I�d have to account for once I moved back to Seattle to live in my possibly tenant-defiled house in three or four years, trying to present myself as a reliable and professional adult. I must say, when I got the call from IT on Thursday morning I never thought I�d be feeling so inadequate and *wrong* about it on Thursday night.

Now it�s later and I�m not done, not with this train of thought and not with the last paragraph, but I have to start getting ready to go out � NiteLite with Vanessa. I feel really lousy and not up to going out, but I just called her and she�s all ready to go, so it�s duty time.