Am I in the Movie, "Brazil?"

So, I'm currently temping for a government agency. It's work that contains both juicy information and utter tediousness. I'm grateful for it, since it's tough to get a "short-term" job when you go to temp agencies. The majority of jobs are long-term, "temp to hire" positions, and I wanted to be truthful about skipping town in a month or two. After applying to SIX temp agencies (a new record), I finally got this job. The pay is so-so, but since our rent is so low, and our time here so short, I'm satisfied.

I can't get into exactly where I'm working, shit, these are the Feds! But basically I've been hired to help a woman sort out her hundreds of files of applications. I've been going through them, one. by. one. Basically I see what's been submitted, what's still needed, or if the file should be eliminated altogether. That's the tedious, stab-myself-in-the-eye part. The interesting part is that the majority of them involve background checks, and I'd say at least 50-70% of those come back with some kind of record. The most interesting one I saw today, was a guilty plea to "Pursuing/Taking/Killed/Possessed or Disposed of Wildlife Illegally," which is a misdemeanor. I imagined some guy with a backyard of cages filled with lemurs or three-toed sloths. Or some kook chasing bunnies around with a shotgun. Or maybe some guy who was cutting the fins off of sharks and selling them secretly to Chinese restaurants. Never mind that Missouri is landlocked.

"He probably hit a deer and threw it in the back of his truck," said my boss, whom we'll call Keisha.

"Oh, sure," I said, feeling stupid. I mean, this is Missouri.

As I troll through stacks of applications, I find myself in a dual role -- benevolent cheerleader and ruthless destroyer of dreams. As I tick off items on the long checklist, I find when someone gets close, I feel a rising sense of glee, "Come on, come on, you're so close. You can make it!'" At the same time, I get a wicked delight in looking up someone's record and finding them a criminal, and therefore, I can then get RID of another file from the suffocating piles surrounding me. "Sorry, scary dude(tte), you're outta here!"

At first I sat at a small desk beside my boss, with NO COMPUTER, but a few days later I was put in some small office with a distracting view of where the majority of the staff take their smoke breaks, en masse. This really surprised me. I have come to see smokers in general as a kind of endangered species. Once in awhile you'll see that one lonely smoker at the side of a building, pushed up against the wall, holding the cigarette close to their body, while giving off that look of both self-consciousness and defiance. But here, I'll look out the window and see a half a dozen people chatting away, propping up the elbow of their smoking hand with the other, looking relaxed and content.

Anyway, the good news is that I'm by myself in a room working -- I love that! AND I have a computer so I can reach certain files, which does include the internet. The bad news is, that they seem to have quite the Big Brother oversight on this thing, and the vast majority of sites I want to visit, including my own blog, are blocked. Even today when I wanted to bring up Wendy's website to see where the closest restaurant was, THAT was blocked. I'm basically limited to yahoo mail (thank god), and some random sites here and there that they haven't seem to have thought of yet. I wonder if they can also monitor every keystroke. God, I hope not. *looks around*

Anyway, it's my 5th day and I'm in the "S"s of the alphabet. *sigh* Then I have to start all over again basically start contacting people to get their shit together that I discovered was missing in the first place.

This may take awhile.