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Show 'Lorraine Nelson A Biography. ." 18 Many temporary employees are career underachievers, unable to commit to a profession the way some men seem incapable of committing to an emotional relationship. They're unreliable and often capricious, floating from whim to whim. It's not uncommon to hear of temps who, without explanation, simply decide not to show up for an assignment. As long as I continued to punch-in and refrained from urinating in the company watercooler or setting my head afire on the printroom floor, I retained my status as ideal employee. Alas, without anyone to talk to or anything substantial to occupy myself, I was listless. I once fed an entire package of lunchmeat I'd found in the company refrigerator through a paper shredder. I sat on the toilet in the bathroom for two hours until my ass fell asleep. No one said a word. But instead of the subversive's exhilaration, I found the effect deflating. It distressed me that corporate America was a machine that could not be unwheeled. Unless one took his spot its cog- l work, it had little use for him. It lumbered forward, laying the misfit under, like bathroom stall pornography scored deeply beneath layers of drab beige paint. And it occurred to me, in business as at the far end of freedom, lies an anonymity. As I'd waddle back from the restroom, through the office floor rat-maze of gray partitions, my soft parts still tingling, I felt just a little more feckless, a little less substantial-for a moment as unmoored and oblique as the able path that twists through our alphabet j>ik^ ^*VH ** °^ Electric lighting is an infamously inefficient enterprise; the average incandescent bulb emits only three percent light while wasting the rest to heat. Even fluorescent bulbs-a vast improvement-expend over eighty five percent of the energy they consume on heat. Our office, like many American offices, was limed by the dull blue light of cheap, four-foot fluorescent tubes. Thirty to a case, the 32 watt General Electric T-8s were rated for twenty thousand hours, which likely explains why I never witnessed a single bulb being replaced. Fluorescent lighting was developed by Edmund Germer, an early twentieth century Berliner and lighting technology engineer, the youngest son of a well respected and sufficiently wealthy |