For now, I work in the Storage Room of Broken Dreams.

It's not the only such storage room in America. In fact, rooms just like it lurk in nondescript administrative buildings clear across the world. Some of them hold the personnel files of the employees of large corporations. Others contain municipal records.

But there is something especially heartbreaking about the Registrar files of a local college. Dismissal forms, police reports, tattered transcripts, sometimes even the surprising Outside World in the form of newspaper clippings or doctors' notes. Both of which only appear to identify why the student didn't.

What is even better, though, is my task in this sad room. My task is to make sure that the large stack of papers that another temp attempted (ha!) to file, but was unsuccessful, in fact belong with files that are missing. He did a good job. 90% of the time he was right. Sometimes I figure out a new spelling. Much of the time the scribbles are illegible. All of which means that 90% of my day is spent *not* filing documents, because those files don't exist.

There is something deeply twisted about the fact that rooms like this need to exist. I wonder if these files will ever be looked at. I wonder, of all the files in that room, which of them will be essential to the success of someone at that school. Which piece of paper in which file will make all the difference? It is possible that it could be the piece of paper that I decipher and insert into the correct manila slot that will someday lead to happiness and glory for someone that attended that school.

The only problem with telling myself that over and over again as I try and find a home for this documentation of a court appearance, or that official form requesting or approving the movement of transcripts, is that eventually, I stop believing it.

It's also because I spend all day *not* filing a whole stack of documents.

I begin to wonder if it matters, at all, where I put them.

I begin to wonder if it would actually help the people that work here for me to just 'disappear' those unfileable documents. But to do that would undermine the very foundation of being a temporary file clerk, and there is simply no way I could ever cross that line.

Even when the last name matches and the first name is close, but clearly different. Even when I'm certain the name on the document before me is probably the true full name that is on the label on the file, in that drawer. If it's not right, I don't file it. And I don't file a lot.

All day, in fact.

It boggles my mind that a job like this could exist. Then I read this article in the NY Times today, and it all makes a little more sense.

Labels: broken dreams, san francisco, temp, work