I am twenty-three years old and working a series of ill-fitting temp jobs. A few days a week, I work in a dark office as "support" for doctors who research anesthesiology.
Even though it is officially the twenty-first century and this is an institution with an impeccable worldwide reputation, I spend at least an hour or two each day wrangling with a screeching electric typewriter. The rest of the time, I reorder office supplies of which we already have a vast quantity. How many cartons of red Bic pens might we need suddenly? At least thirty, apparently. (I don't know this yet, but this urgent overstuffing of an already-full cornucopia of office supplies is a regular feature of such jobs.)
My favorite task is typing up research manuscripts, as this stimulates my mind and makes me feel like I'm actually being useful. Reading along as I type, it becomes clear to me that what they do in this particular lab is anesthetize rats and then torture them with electric shock. In order to tell how well the anesthesia is working, the researchers count how many times the rats' legs twitch, and then graph this information. To me, this seems to be an appallingly medieval sort of "science."
One day, the secretary who works there full-time asks me quietly, "Have you figured out what we really do here?"
I twist up my mouth. "Yes."
"Are you going to leave? The last part-timer we had ran when she found out."
