Is our children learning?

No. Not at all. Not one bit.

Upon moving to Boston, the thought of another endless job search overwhelmed me. When I heard that a staffing group could get me a job in a few hours, I quickly applied with several and before the end of the day I was securely employed for both a nine-to-five and a weekend gig. It wasn't long before I realized that companies make temps put up with the shit that regular employees would never tolerate: ninety hours worth of data entry or twelve hours of being locked in a room with nothing but a dictaphone and a typewriter.

On Monday I was placed at *Simmons College where I have been inputting all the information from prospectives into a very antiquated computer. Their endowment must not be that impressive, because half of the time I have to crouch down at the keyboard with only a footstool to sit on. My seven hour hell each day allows Simmons to send a few hundred lucky girls a sports bag with their applications, but I can't complain because once every few hours they let me stretch out my legs while I file folders for the 5,000 applicants. The task of filing became much more exciting after I worked up the nerve to peek into the folders before putting them away on the wall of shelves.

First there are the unfortunate last names: McLeany, Hinnie, Hineski, Ojbakmalishmar, Vagimal. Then there are the unfortunate first names: Shawnee, Rondee, Franka, Redue. Next come the planned majors: weather, x-ray technology, animals, hair and nails. The planned majors baffle me for two reasons. Obviously, it's silly to imagine an ambitious yet under-accomplished high school girl planning to attend a competitive, private insitution for a vocational degree at the low cost of $18,000 per semester. But what is a bit more disturbing is how boring most of the choices are. Sure, radiologists make a lot of money, but planning to spend 40 years reading pictures of people's insides is pretty dull.

I still can't figure out if it's depressing or uplifting that people apply to a school that is so very far out of their reach. Yesterday I overheard a debate over if it was acceptable to return a girl's application check when her SAT score is in the triple digits. On the one hand, she has absolutely no chance whatsoever of being accepted and therefore it won't cost anything to process her application since it's going to be marked with a giant X. On the other hand, the school can't even afford real office chairs, so they shouldn't be terribly picky about such a gift.

Today I started to glance at the email coorespondence at the top of the files. "Hi, Iam rachel Simon and I mailed you my stuff last week. Can yuo please check it? Let me kow, thanks." Sigh.

*Apparently there's another decently ranked women's college in the Boston area other than Wellesley. Sadly enough, I never realized that Simmons was a women's college. On a more pitiful note, it took me over 4 hours of inputting dozens of girls' names and walking around the campus center to realize that Simmons doesn't allow boys.