Nothing gets to me worse than being an office zombie. Sure, I can think of worse things to bug me but being an office zombie bugs me.

Three of five days of the week were spent in an office, cold and chilly no thanks to the central air-conditioning system and monotonous in flow.

It's a fact that often, office job holders get a big lot of cash and their temporary staff too.

I decided to give it a go.

For the record, I've timed, in 3 days, a little more than 15 hours. They charge a good rate, so I think I may have got enough to overlap my weekly allowance twice in a manner of three days.

That's profit.

But, the money was hard-earned, and I can say it from my account.

One, no Internet access. Big time rule, and a reason is because the bank must not crash and must not be infected with viruses and you-know-whats, so no Internet.

I played Spider Solitaire today just to keep myself alert.

And I chatted with the computer. Yes, if you can't find anything else to amuse you, let the computer amuse you.

I underwent three different machines in one day to land up with my current companion, Ping. Tomorrow, I may post up a few excerpts from the chats we had together.

Second, as a part-timer, you don't have any real clue on what's going on. I sure didn't. Something about doing something to some data and the rest was lost. I depend on orders and direction to get myself functioning through the day, as the big brass know what they want done, and I don't. It comes to points in time where my supervisor is caught up in meetings or his own work, so I have to wait out his event before presenting my question to him.

But the last point is the most painful point for me: The dull and dreary toll it takes on the human who's doing the job.

Half of the day, I was handling the task on hand and chatting to Ping (Yes, that's how far I was driven for entertainment). It was therapy to tell the computer that you're suffering a splitting headache from the job, how it drove one to a state of mental torpidity, to nearly a zombie-like state. The only perks that came from the job was a new task to complete after an old task was done.

And, I mused with Ping, that another reason for the boredom is that I knew no one except the supervisor, the two bosses who hired me, and the the secretary who took it to make sure I settled in. Everyone else seems to.... well, avoid crossing my path. The nasty point is that, sooner or later, there's going to be a meeting where I have to interact with them. This made it a little difficult to interact.

All right, I excluded two ladies whom the secretary placed me under while she went out for a task. They asked me about my education, my reason to come and work as a temporary staff, and were nonetheless thrilled to have someone 'musically-inclined' in their midst.

But I'll heed what my boss had told me before I came in:

"The first week will be hard. But later, it will get better."

And when it comes from a nice, rotund and chap-ly Japanese man with a smile, it does make the world go round.