The intangibles, here, and this will be only one in the circuit of temp agencies I'll go to in the next couple of weeks, are the typing test, my ability to smile over the sickening din my stomach is making, and whether the brakes work when my more rational half applies them to when I think I am being charming.

Oddly, I have never been charming to anyone who could offer me employment. I have charmed the stray counter gal at the coffee shop, I have charmed teachers in classes back in the dim days when I went to classes, but people who can offer me employment,not a one, personne.Nor cops. Never have I charmed a cop.

So I start writing down the particulars of my life on the form. I bring a pen, and on the second line, this is some law of physics,it runs out of ink, so I have to get another pen. Giving me a chance to charm the receptionist, who is
uninterested, but does offer me another pen. Good. Back to putting down telephone numbers, that long series of people who, when I worked for them, I alternately made fun of or despised.


Then brakes, go slowly, as I try to navigate the questions thrown at me by my human services agent. Or she might be a human resources agent. Or she might be an employment counselor. One of those titles. Questions like: what, in your opinion, do you do least well? Organize? Communicate? Timeliness? Cooperate? Other? Pick them all, I think feverishly, starting to drift off into Gogol ( I am the Nose! - perhaps I should scream this?), pick organize, I mean obviously I wouldn't be darkening the fucking door if I was better organized, and how about communicate, hey, I think I'm a writer and then, if you bother to look at my form, you'll notice I put in the wrong phone number under Home phone. Can you believe it? Had to scribble out the number, there,so, so much for fucking communication, and cooperation, if I could pour out the vials of my wrath...

But I navigate this, I do. No psychotic episodes, or at least in my opinion. I'm so open, in fact, my arms are even down, down resting on the armrests, we are
all open her, rather than folding my arms over my chest, in the classic existential freeze posture. My dad always likes that one, encountering strangers. But not me, I've learned. And then I'm signing away, with a careless
joke, my right to my urine, of course, why should I care if they take my urine,and now this form? This one where I sign away my right to resist their incursions into the particulars of my credit history? Where I let the powers that be, who have always supported the Nazi side, in the manichean structure of world history, who in my case have never once been benign except as that term applies to cancers, where I let these kinds of folks or computers or whatever megamachine look into every debt I've never paid back,where I let them dredge that
up and hang it from me like a tail? Oh, sure, no problem. And then, as to what I, in my consideration, after careful forethought, would say was the thing I could most improve on: I look into the soft dazzle of my agent's eyes, and in a
pouty whisper I say, I could be better at multi-tasking.

Goodby to her, and I'm sure she's already chucking my form in the garbage. But I can't dwell on that, because I'm fleetfooting back to the receptionist and time to take the ultimate test. The typing test. First I am plumped down in a chair in the receptionist's office, who will remember me, I hope, for the charming manner in which I requested a pen. But the receptionist is busy, she is on the phone. I listen in, hoping to get some
pointers - oh, this time I feel that insurance job is surely within my reach!