In November, our friend Camper found an ad on Craigslist for a part-time position at Moscone Center. A company that staffs conventions needed registrars, room monitors, and other flunkies at hourly wages ranging from $9 to $12. Camper and Dog Bites decided to apply. Dog Bites has a degree in journalism. Camper has a degree in physics and made $70,000 two years ago.
Both of us got hired.
SUNDAY
On our first day of training, we ran into Camper, dressed in the company uniform (khaki pants, blue oxford shirt) plus a pair of $150 J.Crew sunglasses. Dog Bites quickly calculated that the shades cost nearly as much as we would earn that week. We found ourselves doing many such computations in our head, such as how 24 hours of work (our first assignment) would net us $216.
During training, a woman next to us sucked down a can of breakfast drink and said she had dealt blackjack in Atlantic City for 14 years. Now, as a full-time temp, she makes less than $9,000 a year. She also said many of the other trainees looked familiar to her. Dog Bites had thought that people who worked for temp agencies did so, um, temporarily. Apparently, it is more of an established subculture than we realized. In the microworld of convention staffers, some "temps" have been doing the job for more than 10 years. The first wave of panic washed over us.
We relaxed a bit when we realized some trainees seemed to be enjoying themselves. One man, with a ribbon of facial hair à la Prince, sat with his shirt untucked, one arm thrown across the back of a chair. He asked questions in a highly enunciated voice and laughed at the trainer's ad-libs. When people behind him whispered, he made theatrically loud throat-clearing noises.
He nodded as the trainer talked about calming "irate surgeons." Our job description included mollifying their endemic impatience, which, according to our trainer, could erupt at any moment for any reason and be directed at the nearest non-surgeon -- i.e., a staffing person.
We then took a tour of the building, trying desperately to reassure ourselves that the job did not define us. Making fun of other staffers seemed to help stabilize our plummeting self-confidence. A future room monitor with a jeans handbag tried to go down the up escalator. Another woman wore -- gasp -- beige pants with an elastic waistband. However, we had to accept that we had been assigned to pass out stubby little pencils, the kind commonly found on golf courses and in bowling alleys, in the sublevel of Moscone Center to 12,000 surgeons over the next four days.
We weren't in a position to make fun of anyone else.
MONDAY
We took BART in from West Oakland with our boyfriend, who stared at us the whole way. He was fascinated by how much we looked like a lesbian in our uniform.
We discovered that our first assignment was with Prince and a young woman we'll call College Girl. CG had decided she was in charge, but was uncertain about Prince's competence. One of our group's duties was counting chairs before a particular medical presentation began, so that after it got under way we could count empty chairs and subtract them from the total to see how many surgeons had attended. Already Prince had multiplied 14 rows by 14 chairs and gotten 296. He had no interest in hearing why he shouldn't carry the 1 more than once.
Two hours after the first presentation had begun, Prince wandered back from wherever the hell he'd been as Dog Bites was passing out pencils and survey forms for the surgeons to jot down their comments.
"I'll do this," Prince gallantly offered. "Why don't you sit down?"
Our first instinct was to shield our armful of forms. We didn't mind the work. Indeed, we craved the brief interpersonal communication. But we realized we were getting proprietary over a very small, very low-paying job. We acquiesced and sat on the carpet. As we did so, College Girl approached and, unbelievably, began to review the staffing company's instruction sheet with us.
She ran her finger beneath certain rules such as "no reading" and "pay attention to the speaker," as if we were in imminent danger of bringing the entire session to a halt with our lassitude. We said nothing. We let her have her moment.
Finally, the surgeons began to file out of the room and hand us their stubby pencils and survey sheets. Next to us was a fire door with one of those wide, push-in handles, and every time we put a pencil on the handle to keep our hands free, CG immediately snatched it up and placed it carefully in the pencil return box. We began to enjoy ourselves, deliberately spacing the pencils so that CG had to lean over.
Our next assignment was to direct traffic at Room 305, where the scheduled presentation had been moved to Room 135. The session's title was "Pain Management," and the two staffers working the room were having a good time with it.
"Pain Management" had a session number -- 7 -- and a staffer named Ed asked a doctor if he was looking for Session 7. The doctor looked at him blankly. So Ed, giddy and nearly unable to contain himself, sprung his line.
"Are you here for pain?" he asked.
The doctor guffawed, then grimaced unsurely.
"I hope not," he said, taking a survey form. "Is it painful?"
Ed leaned forward conspiratorially.
"It depends on whether I kick you in the shins or not," he said, showing his gums.
""Pain Management' has been moved to Room 135," Dog Bites put in quickly, hoping to limit the damage.
But Ed was on a roll. He asked each doctor who came up, "Are you here for pain?"
The scene was the same outside Room 135.
"Pain. This is pain," a staffer named Alma repeated. We heard the word "pain" every 10 seconds.
We noticed an increasingly familiar phenomenon in Room 135: the struggle for power, the drive to establish territory. Here, Alma was in charge. She wore bright pink lipstick and an American flag lapel pin. Four staffers were already handing out survey forms. So Dog Bites counted chairs. When we returned to record our count on the session report form, Alma came up behind us.
"You don't have to do that," she said. "I'll take care of it."
Dog Bites retired to the back wall, venturing forth only once to count the attendees. Finally, Alma approached us holding the report form. Her nails were long and scraped against the paper.
"What does this mean?" she asked, pointing to where we'd written "1:30, 235."
"It was 1:30 when I did the head count, which was 235," we said.
She looked at us uncomprehendingly.
"But what is this?" She pointed to where we'd written "1:30."
We repeated, louder, that it had been 1:30 when we took the count.
"Maybe I'm not asking the question in the right way," she said.
She was trying to belittle us in some way, but for the life of us we couldn't figure out how. We were fascinated by where this might be going.
She pointed to the next line, where we'd indicated that the session had started at 1:35.
"We do the count after the session starts," she said.
Ah. We responded that it had been around 1:30 when we did the count. We offered to let her change it.
"It's supposed to be right."
Ok, then, it was "around 1:40."
"Let's just change it to that."
She painstakingly wrote "1:40" over "1:30."
"We have another problem," she said, pointing to where we'd written that the session started at 1:35.
"When I do this," she said helpfully, "I just write that they start on time. Otherwise, we have to say why."
"1:35 is on time," we said.
She shook her head pityingly.
"Why would you say it started late?"
"It didn't," we repeated. "You can change it to 1:30 if you want."
"But we can't change these."
"You just changed the time of the head count from 1:30 to 1:40."
She looked at the paper. Our line of reasoning apparently had no impact.
"Well, we can't change this one," she said.
"OK."
"You have to say why it started late."
"OK."
"Why did it start late?"
We were no help.
"Moderator's discretion?" she ventured. "How does that sound?"
"That sounds great," we said.
Alma smiled and set the session report in the middle of the table, where she could make sure it was not further tampered with.
TUESDAY
At 7 a.m., we met Andrew the A/V guy. We asked if he was always up so early. He grimaced.
"If I'd wanted to do this," he said, "I would have been a dairy farmer."
At the backs of the meeting rooms were folded-over pieces of white cardboard. They had "CAUTION" printed in big black letters on them. Suddenly, Breakfast Drink ran out of Room 135, squealing in terror.
"It's a mouse!" she screeched. "I touched it! I've got that sticky goo all over my fingers now."
We looked at one of the cardboard contraptions. It was, indeed, a mousetrap. We lifted it gingerly with a pen. A tiny tail writhed back and forth. The other A/V guy, Joe, volunteered that the luckless creature had been stuck there since yesterday.
"We were doing a video recording in the afternoon, so they asked everyone to be quiet." But the mouse, he said, "was like, "Cheep, cheep, cheep.'"
WEDNESDAY
Dog Bites e-mailed friends that we were passing out pencils at Moscone for $9 an hour and fantasizing about stabbing our eyes out with them.
Ed found us as we awaited morning instructions in the sublevel. He talked at length about his former job in "the industry," meaning wine. He said he worked with a master sommelier who everyone thinks walks on water. Then Ed karate-chopped his shoulder and blurted, "But he comes up to here on me! It's like, he's just a guy!"
"Is his name Larry?" we asked.
Ed tipped his head back reverently.
"Larry Stone," he whispered.
"I used to have to talk to him on the phone," we said, immediately wishing we hadn't. Dog Bites once had been a leg girl for a local newspaper gossip columnist and occasionally trolled at Stone's restaurant for items.
Ed continued: "I went by Rubicon one day and ... said, "Tell Larry Ed is here.' They were like, Who is this guy?"
Getting excited as he unrolled his tale, Ed stood up, planted a foot on a chair, and aimed his crotch at us.
"Then Larry came up and said, "Give him a bottle of wine.' He came by later and sat with me. He saw something was going on with the staff, so he said, "He tastes wine with me.' They were like ..." Ed mimicked a hovering, inquisitive staff in lock step, hunching his shoulders up to his ears and clamping his arms to his sides.
Dog Bites put her head on the table.
Since those first days at Moscone, we have moved up in the world. Alas, we haven't moved on. After five months, we have been assigned to registration, where we get paid $11 an hour and use a computer. Our bitterness has faded to amusement and acceptance. However, our patience has limits.
It was sorely tested by the recent Soccer Card Outrage. This began when a woman representing a group of conventioneers showed up with two plastic cards, one red and one yellow, on a cord around her neck. When any of the Moscone staffers committed an offense, she flashed a card as if she were a World Cup referee. She apparently invented the offenses as she went along.
A thirsty staffer got a yellow card for filling his 1-liter water bottle at the staff water cooler. Apparently, it would have been preferable for him to refill a pint bottle multiple times. Dog Bites and her comrades went on the warpath, stage-whispering complaints the entire morning. The supervisor eventually got the point. By lunchtime, the card lady was gone. Goal!
Dog Bites no longer looks askance at surly service workers after this morale-boosting demonstration of camaraderie. The transformation is complete. We have become one of them.
