Chinese Water Torture

That pretty much sums up my working experience with the 2006 Census. I was led to believe, over the course of completing my Sociology major, that employment with Statistics Canada was the proverbial mountain top of disciplinary satisfaction. Though such a bold claim may still hold true, it definitely does not correlate directly to what I've been hired to accomplish.

I've uttered an oath of secrecy to Big Brother, which is binding for L-I-F-E, so I'll have to be as vague about my job as possible. My first two shifts were spent staring blankly at my cubicle wall, once all possible topics of co-worker conversation were exhausted, as there was apparently "nothing to do, yet." Surely the cogs of statistical enumeration would be put into motion after the long-weekend! Right?

I spent my third shift embroiled in solving mind puzzles, watching the first period of the Oilers game over supper, then printing 1200 recruitment posters for a higher-paid position than mine. It was my function to feed the paper into the printer and extract the posters in piles of 20. The higher-ups then took these piles of 20, jammed them all together, and distributed them to my co-workers...who were given the task of sorting them into piles of 20 for envelope encapsulation. At some point I also made a "sign-in" form in Excel.

Thursday night I made a few more forms in Excel since management was impressed with my spreadsheet-abilities from the previous shift, stared off into blank space until supper, when I watched the Oilers get destroyed in the first period, and finished the shift off by completing all the puzzles in the Journal. At the shift's conclusion, management was still unsure as to when our "work" would be arriving.

Normally I wouldn't mind being paid to do nothing, but I'm doing nothing at a much lower rate of pay than I was led to believe, for far fewer hours than "full-time employment" categorically entails. I must've missed the memo outlining how 2 + 2 = 5.

I will give the Feds credit for one thing - they sure aimed high when hiring us office drones...just ask the Physics Honours student, the girl accepted into Dentistry, or the Science undergraduate with a published book on Harmony Theory! There's probably a Nobel Prize winner lurking around the Zerox machine, sobbing softly into his $6.00/month-water/coffee-pool coffee.

Currently: Wishing I hadn't drunk so much coffee during the night shift.