I suspected from an early age that I wasn’t cut out for “work,” yet the summer after my junior year of college, I found myself sitting in the plant-studded grayscale office of a temp agency talking up my “skill set,” desperate for a job.

It was 1994 and my liberal arts education hadn’t taught me how to turn on a computer, type, or answer a multi-line phone, but I cleaned up good and could file things more or less alphabetically. Plus, having just returned from a year abroad, I had excellent oral and written intercultural communication skills, which I was sure to mention anytime you turned around.

Somehow I managed to land an assignment with an Italian builder who worked out of a trailer on the edge of the forest he was razing.  But don’t let the visual connotations associated with “trailer” fool you – old Mr. Roma had some tricked out digs, complete with cherry wood furnishings, granite countertops, and state-of-the-art office equipment. It was just he and his daughter running the biz, and he needed a girl to answer phones, make photocopies, and cater to his every beck and call.

That girl was me.

I showed up for work bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and full of anxiety that my utter and complete lack of practical life skills was about to be exposed.  And sure enough, Roma’s office was equipped with a computer, a fax machine/copier, and a multi-line phone. Which is to say that if I was talking to a person on line one and another line rang, I would have to somehow pick up the second line without hanging up the first. There was also a remote possibility that a third or fourth line would ring while one and two were tied up, in which case I would have no choice but to cut and run. Not only that, but I was expected, using instinct alone, to know which calls to take a message for and which calls to put through.

Soon it became apparent that though I had no problems hunting and pecking my way to a 4.0 grade point average on my Brother word processor at school, I was not mentally capable of formatting a Word Perfect document or keeping two phone calls in the air at once.  I also had a knack for putting disgruntled customers through to Mr. Roma but hanging up on his wife.  So you might say I was “on notice” from the very start.

On the second morning of my tenure as I sat composing poetry at my desk, old man Roma started bellowing at me from the inner sanctum.

“Rini!” he hollered, because he thought that was my name, “Get in here right now!”

When I materialized at his side, he made a grand yet vague gesture toward the picture window behind him and said, “What, is this?”

To venture a guess would have been suicide, like the time in fourth grade when Sister Carmella tricked me into fathoming the place where my perpetually misplaced milk ticket should be stored. After burning through three wrong answers in a row (lunch box? pencil case? leg warmer?) she released me from my misery by revealing the answer I could never have hoped to guess. (“Inside your front uniform pocket.”)

Clearly, if I’d known where I was supposed to keep my milk ticket or what was up Mister Roma’s ass, neither of us would have been there in the first place. But being all too familiar with the way grade school teachers and members of organized crime families like to assert their authority, I was prepared to play along.

My error, as it turned out, was that I’d slanted the vertical blinds in the wrong direction when I’d opened them that morning – a grievous mistake that old man Roma was sure I would never make again. From that point forward, my time in the office was spent alternating between boredom and the sheer terror of being asked to do work of any kind.

Later that day, I had to “put a fax through.” It was like being asked to program a SCUD missile. I waited until Mister Roma had retreated into his lair before circling the FASCIMILE MACHINE to look for clues as to how it might work.  What I found was all manner of blinking controls and no clear way to pinpoint the vacuum powered chute that would propel my document out of the trailer and to its final destination in space.

After a time, I went ahead and crammed the sheaf of papers – staples and all – through a vice-like orifice which promptly sucked them in, causing the whole FASCIMILE MACHINE to make an awful choking sound, sputter and die. Though common sense dictated that I come clean to old man Roma about the demise of his apparatus at once, I chose to shield him from the knowledge for as long as I possibly could (less than one day.)

Coincidentally, the temp agency called that evening to inform me with regret that Roma Builders no longer required my services.  It was a crushing blow, and proof that my mother had been on to something when she said, “How can a person go to college and not even learn how to type?”

I did eventually learn to operate not only office equipment, but also factory automation software and later got a job (this is the truth) writing technical manuals for oil refineries and nuclear power plants.

I live in fear of the phone call I’ll get the day one of them blows up, but at least I’ll know how to photocopy and laminate a fake passport so I could get the hell out of Dodge.

You can read more from Rima on her personal website, Rimarama.com.