Word: tempe
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LIVING ROOM COUCH—At the dawn of summer freedom, I thought that fulfillment would come from an internship or a temp job and a few weekends at the beach. I had no idea that I would also spend the next three months destroying mythical monsters, cavorting with Greek gods and repeatedly saving the world from the schemes of a mad scientist...
Fluent in Russian and trained as a doctor's assistant, George Borayev, 23, of Asheville, N.C., was initially thrilled with his temp job as a real-life "interpreter of maladies" for immigrants seeking medical help from the county health department. "I was excited to get this job," Borayev says. "It uses my language, and it's in the same field as my degree." He worked happily as a contract employee for almost two years until this spring, when a tax bill close to $2,000 and a $1,000 emergency root canal pushed the drawbacks of perma-temping right...
...this army of high-skilled temps gathers strength, there are costs to the companies that tap their talent. Jeff Wittman, 41, of Indianapolis, Ind., is about to start his third auditing assignment in six months. "I'm having fun," he says, but he misses the relationships that can be built over time by staying with one company. That sense of detachment can run deep. "When I first went into nursing, employers felt responsibility for their employees," says Chris Springer, 41, a temp in Omaha. "But you don't see that anymore in the U.S. So now I say, 'Show...
...TEMP NATION Skilled workers join the ranks...
...have somehow become the novelist's shorthand for the middle-class everyman. Paul Trilby, the hero of James Hynes' Kings of Infinite Space (St. Martin's; 341 pages), is the proud possessor of a Ph.D. in English, an illustrious achievement that has earned him a job as an office temp at the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services. TxDoGS, as its denizens call it, is a dreary cubicle farm consecrated to obscure bureaucratic functions. When a co-worker dies at his desk while working overtime on a pointless assignment, Paul's low-level anomie turns...