Holiday party...again

I just took part in the third and final holiday party of the year at the company that I don't even work for, really. It was an afternoon affair, as they all have been, possibly due to the fact that the entire company seems overly enthused by the prospect of getting out of work early.

As we sat at one of about four tables in the restaurant event space, we were handed a sheet of paper. "This will be SO FUN!" said the woman who handed us the paper. "Go around and guess which fact belongs to which person!" It was hard to read the facts and not be judgemental. "My favorite color is red" was at the low end of the fact totem pole, while "Participated in a banana eating contest during intermission of a monster truck rally" was at the very, very top. Since I had not been asked for a fact of my own to be included, I started claiming other peoples' facts. In fact, I claimed several of them. "Yep, I had a gin and tonic with Walter Cronkite while running a marathon. Shortly thereafter, I had scarlet fever and my husband and I had six grandchildren."

Throughout all of this, a waiter hovered around our table. He had asked us if we wanted wine when we first arrived, but since I had been on the losing end of a battle between my corporeal body and a shaker of chocolate martinis this past weekend, I merely blanched and asked for a diet Coke. The waiter smiled and creepily said "Your happiness is important." He passed by frequently, each time saying something along the lines of "I want to look out for your happiness," which made me turn to a co-worker and remark on the fact that I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of missing teenagers in his neighborhood and a lime pit in his crawlspace.

At the end of the little soiree, the head of the design department stopped by to chat. A lovely woman, she fended off the creepy wine-pusher as best she could, but she had already had enough to bring color to her cheeks and loosen her tongue. "You've been here a year, right?" she said, looking at me. I nodded in assent and she said "That came up in a meeting not too long ago. We totally didn't realize you had been here a whole year. Everybody wonders why you're still temping."

I gathered that she meant people thought I should be an employee or a contractor or something, but there's a nagging feeling that everyone is wondering when my assignment will be over for real. I'm working on a database that only I use and no one in the company likes. It's like having a really unpleasant, ugly baby...no one wants to help you with it and you're not too thrilled about being its caretaker, either. But it still persists because the new database meant to replace our system is an uglier, more unpleasant baby...with chronic diarrhea.

So I keep temping. Nothing else to do, really. If I have gotten nothing out of this temping experience (aside from steady paychecks), however, at least I know that someone in the company used to be a child model and someone else got a concussion playing T-ball.