An Excerpt From "Temp-to-Hire".

   The people who'd been working in the office for a few years began getting suspicious of me.  They had every right to, but they didn't know they had the right to, and that's what's been cheesing me off recently.

   I started as a temp, but then it got out of hand.  My boss, Mr. Horn, thought I was "too qualified", and gave me a promotion after two weeks.  I didn't have the heart to tell him I had no idea what I was doing; I didn't know anything about stocks, bonds, interest rates, or audit trails.  He called me into his office on my third Monday on the job.

  "I'll bet you're wondering why I called you into my office," he said.

  I figured I must have done something wrong.  The temp agency made a mistake in sending me here, I thought.  Mr. Horn continued.

  "I'll bet you're wondering why a busy man like myself has taken time away from the first minutes of my work week to talk to someone like yourself." 

  "Sir, I'm sorry if..." I started, but he interrupted.

  "There's no need to call me 'Sir' anymore, Kevin.    I'm giving you a promotion.  From now on, you call me 'Mr. Horn'."

  He explained to me that since I'd begun working with his firm, profits had tripled, and I was the only X-factor he could discern in the equation as to why that happened.  I would earn far more than my current salary, plus commission.  Hiring me full-time, he said, would also scare the weak links in the office into buckling down and doing a better job themselves, that my upgrade would send a message that new blood is out there waiting to dominate the field.  "Plus," he said "it wouldn't hurt to have someone around the office who wasn't totally hideous."  I smiled and nodded to thank him for the compliment, but I didn't know specifically  what he was talking about.

  I thought that if I stuck with it at least a few more weeks, I would be financially secure for a long time.  But now, it's officially been fourteen months.  I still don't know what I'm doing, but my firm continues to be successful.  Any time I thought about learning about what my job entails, I stopped myself, reasoning that awareness of any kind would become a hinderance to any of my achievements.  I know now that the firm's success had nothing to do with me, that I had been in the right place at the right time, and if any other person landed that temp job, they would be in my position instead of me.  But just because I'm a phony, that doesn't mean Randall and Dave have the right to give me dirty looks around the office.