Working the past few months as a New York City office temp, I wish I had a collection of vivid, touching and funny portraits of people I've met that I could share with you, like a corporate Johnny Appleseed spreading the good seeds of humanity so prevalent in offices.

But all I have is this massive gray area in my memory where most of us have more vivid memories which, if one is a full-time employee, will relate to the heroes and villains of our every-day work world. I encounter office scenarios eerily (and depressingly) similar to each other. Very few leave the type of lasting scars that cause one to gaze drunkenly at Tony Danza reruns every night, constantly bitch and moan about one's lot in life, or any other ominous manifestations of a murdered soul.

The portrait I get of myself is like that of a World War II G.I. Whether it's Anzio, Guadalcanal or Normandy: same shit, different beach. Someone will be shooting at me from a secure bunker on the hill while I try not to drown. The good part is I get paid too much for doing too little; the bad part is I get no health benefits, nor paid vacation/holiday time.

Why do it? Because after a decade in New York City of "real" corporate jobs, I find the prospect of settling into another one off-putting, bordering on nightmarish. As a temp, I can move around, skip the demoralizing office politics and take time off at my discretion. And some assignments are actually fun. To give you an idea of my experiences, I'm going to describe some of the recurring themes I've seen as a New York City office temp. Were I to spend more time around these people, especially outside of work, I would see a more complete, human picture. The same could be said of death row inmates.

The Chief Executive Officer. The Big Cheese. Always white guys. Well, not always--let's say proportionate to the number of black guys in the NBA. Every place I work, I try to get a look at the annual report. Why? So I can smirk at the elegant pictures of homely old white men who always seem to run these places, often with upper-crusty names (like Rothschild or Horatio), posing regally in their leather chairs. Usually that's the only place I see them, as they hibernate in their corner offices like vampires in mahogany coffins. They don't care whether everyone's miserable, hundreds of employees need to be laid off to increase shareholder returns or the Virgin Mary just ran naked through the hall with her hair on fire. Once that golden parachute is strapped to their backs, everything else just floats away. But you'd be wrong to insinuate this as sloth. Lack of concern, yes, but sloth? No--many of these men, assuming they didn't inherit it, assiduously clawed their way to the top and are reveling in the isolation of their power.

They're a strange breed, and why corporations are so foul. The golden rule of any company: the personality of its leader will be the personality of the workplace. And that generally means chilly aloofness mixed with illogical bursts of rage and paranoia. Much as one can walk into a library and notice "that book smell," one can walk into a major corporation and, like a dog, sense "that fear smell." (Small companies? Sometimes they're run much better than major corporations; sometimes they're much worse. It all depends on who's running the show and what his/her values are.)

Upper-Level Management. Always white guys. Well, not always--eh, you know the drill. Often they'll have killer job titles: Senior Associate Vice President and Liaison to Corporate Legal Practices in Europe and Asia. Or some other such shit, which can be summarized thusly: A Big Cheese. To get this far in business generally takes a long time, a serious dedication to the job and a healthy dose of ruthless ambition. As a result, talking to these people can be like talking to a robot. They speak to you, but never with you. Whether they are boorish tyrants or a genuinely decent people (I've met plenty of both), there's always a certain sad distance they will purposely maintain from "the underlings." They've traded camaraderie for money, and judging by corporate environments in general, I can't blame them.

A recent assignment of mine had a good example of the Upper-Level Management mentality. A man, touchingly, made a point to leave early every Tuesday to attend his son's Little League game. One week, upon hearing the news that the game was rained out, he frowned, stalked back to his office, and drafted a memo to the league commissioner, complaining that "a little rain never hurt anyone." He then had his assistant type the memo and FedEx it to the commissioner's home address. The rest of his day, which otherwise would have been spent taking an early train home, he gazed morosely out his rainy corner office window and took no calls. His assistant played Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on her computer's CD-ROM drive and stared at him.

The worst effect of Upper-Level Management is that their underlings, whether out of insecurity or lack of identity, will mimic their professional ennui, thus turning the office environment into a dreary, impersonal holding pen, while dreams deferred and emotions stifled waft through the late-afternoon hallways like stale farts.

Mid-Level Management. The Professional Worriers. Sometimes these people are entirely competent; other times, they're hideously incompetent. This is the place where they find out how far they will go in business, and don't be surprised if incompetent mid-level managers with a well-nurtured knack for ass-kissing go farther. These are often people in their late 20s/early 30s settling into their lives. As a result, their jobs become careers, often willingly, and take on an urgency that ages them in dog years. Hairs turn gray, if they're lucky, and fall out if not. Spare tires magically appear around their waists. Whether their lives had "purpose" or not, this is where they are assigned a clear purpose (get married, make money, pay mortgage, provide for children) that will demand they stay their course and not get wacky urges to be starving artists.

I've met some great people at this level. One man plastered his office with water colors his three-year-old daughter had done and would stop in the middle of a conversation to tell me what each painting meant. I could clearly see that he was overjoyed to have a well-paying job, and that his being there provided a good home for his little girl. I imagine most people with children have that feeling somewhere inside, but damn few I've met in upper levels of corporations dare express it so openly.

I've met some raging assholes, too, usually of the variety who take out stress on anyone who can't officially retaliate. Examples like this are too numerous to mention. If there's one area in a corporation where people tend to crack, it's mid-level management.

The Brassy Lifer Assistant. Usually women, often suburban. Been at this job "a thousand years" (pronounced "yiz"). Cigarette rasp and saucy mouth. Convinced her boss would crumble without her. (Her boss is usually the aforementioned Upper-Level lonely boy, who wouldn't blink twice if the building fell down and killed everyone over his lunch hour.) Framed pictures of tough-but-sweet-looking, working-class husbands, and children, even if she has none, children of siblings, next to garish stuffed animals and self-help aphorisms pinned among the phone lists and cost codes. Phone calls to significant others ("hoy, how ah yah, honey?"), sassy sex jokes, hourly reports on the physical health of numerous family members.

I get the clearest pictures of the assistants because I'm often filling in for one. They come in all types: struggling actors/artists/writers with a day job; corporate climbers starting at the bottom rung; young women looking to meet that corporate Mr. Right. But the hard-core assistants I usually deal with are the brassy lifers. Depending on their personalities, this can be great fun, or a genuine pain in the ass. The worst is when they have a bloated sense of self importance--without fail, these people are awful at their jobs, but have been doing it so long, no one notices how awful they are. The best is when they're friendly, but have a well-honed surliness from being stuck in the same place for years on end.

Without fail, there is an air of sadness around these women. Most assistant spots in corporations are meant as transient positions where one spends time, learns the ropes then moves up to the next rung. When this does not happen, the woman is stating that she is not willing to climb the corporate ladder and is settling for a position that suits her lifestyle, be it in terms of money, time, pressure, etc. The woman may want to have children, spend time with her husband, not turn herself into the kind of automatons she deals with daily, etc. It's often a choice of wisdom and sanity. But wisdom and sanity are not necessary requirements, and often detriments, in corporate environments.

There's the rub. Many "successful" people in corporations operate on the premise that they must achieve more, more, more in their professional lives, whatever the cost; the brassy lifer has negated this by saying, "This is enough for me." As a result, those who don't advocate this unfettered and healthy self acceptance will subtly look down on these women. No one ever talks about this, but I feel it all the time in these places (they do, too), and it makes me sick.

Executive assistants are another story--their jobs are either the best or the worst in the company, depending on the executive. They usually get paid a truckload of money and get buried with the pharaoh (which I will explain later).

The Mailroom. This will be the racial inverse of the Upper-Level Management category. Remember the movie Dirty Dancing? There's that introductory scene where Baby happens upon the greasers' rocking bunkhouse where they're all dirty dancing and having a whale of a time, despite their downtrodden socio-economic status at the ritzy summer resort in the Catskills. I get the same feeling in mailrooms, maybe the only places in corporations where I feel comfortable. These are the guys who make the company softball teams good and of whom the Upper-Levels defensively state at polo matches, "Now, wait a minute, Rothschild, we have plenty of Negroes working in our office."

Another strange rule about corporations: the lower you go in the food chain, the more human employees become. The guys in the mailroom don't give a shit--well, they do to the point where they want to keep their jobs. But they're not going to stand on ceremony, try to make you feel small, or play some bizarre head game on you in some infantile power play. By "don't give a shit" I mean they just work, for a pittance. I wouldn't be surprised if most of these guys were dealing with white people on a regular, mass basis for the first time in their lives. What an impression! Like visiting New York, and the first place you see is the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which I playfully call the asshole of New York. As a rural, working-class white man, I was probably as shocked and disgusted as they were in my first few months in an urban corporate environment. It's a real eye-opener. I'll leave it at that!

The Computer Help People. Most corporations have at least one "computer help" person in a department; some have dozens. And I can't tell you how good it feels to deal with one who is a genuinely helpful person willing to treat me with courtesy and respect.

Please, those who know what I'm talking about, stop laughing and pointing at the screen. Computer help people are like a lot of fast-food workers I meet: so frazzled and angry from dealing with obnoxious customers that they treat every customer like shit. There's something about the computer industry that attracts people, usually men, who get along better with machines than humans. I generally have no problem with this, except some of them are being hired for the sole purpose of providing help to fellow humans. I've seen them in action and have seen the kind of crises they deal with, which often come down to simple common sense and a grain of computer knowledge. Their jobs seem to be all-or-nothing ordeals where they are thrown into these pressure cookers or have nothing to do.

I'd say the computer help people will be the insane postal workers of the next century, but I've seen the amount of money they make. It's hard for people getting paid that much to snap. Yes, plenty of bitching and moaning, and a rotten attitude, but no shopping for semi-automatic weapons at Walmart. These relatively recent additions to the corporate climate fit right in: unhappy people making too much money. (Just as "Arbeit macht frei" was on placards over all of Hitler's youth camps, this motto would be perfect for major corporations.)

Getting Buried with the Pharaoh. This is when a person works for a mean-spirited prick and/or incompetent fool and has his/her life turned into a living hell, with little choice in the matter, save for resigning. On a lesser level, it's also that sense of underlings having to alter their personalities to match that of their deranged Type A bosses to survive. I've been buried with the Pharaoh a few times--and all I got was this lousy paragraph.

The Long-Distance Caller. This is an ironic pun on those people who, instead of simply standing up and walking over to someone in an office 10 feet away, will call the person, often getting an assistant, who will look directly at the caller and think, "What in the hell is wrong with you, you lazy asshole?" Power play? Sloth? Personality Disorder? Yes, yes, yes--and so much more.

Homely Middle-Aged Women Wearing Short Skirts. This is the female equivalent of Homely Middle-Aged Men Wearing Toupees, who are obvious, but their female counterparts are as strange. All I know is that when I'm in an office, and there is a woman who is middle-aged, physically bland or unattractive, and showing off her legs, I avoid her like the plague. Why? She'll have a blind spot in her personality concerning how odd she looks, which may mean nothing but often represents a warped sense of vanity that no one else seems to be appreciating. Now, if a homely middle-aged man came in wearing a toupee and short skirt . . .

The Gay Employee. I'm not one of these creepy pundits who claim to have gay-dar. There are times when a gay man in drag as Carmen Miranda could run up and bite me on the ass, and I still wouldn't know he was gay. Yet, I'm forever seeing obviously gay men in the corporate world subterfuging their identities for the sake of the job. One thing many gay men have is that unmistakable personality: unbelievably friendly, wildly funny, a profound sense of the comi-tragic. It's a great thing to see in full bloom. Which is why when I see gay men stifle it for the sake of their suit-and-tie jobs, it painfully illustrates that we all do to a great extent. I fully understand why they have to do it--my criticism is more of an environment so rigid that simply being who you are is quietly understood as being unacceptable.

Corporate Humor. I like a good laugh as much as anyone. But for the life of me, I'll hear coworkers laughing over lame jokes and shaggy-dog stories in ways that make me think I must be crazy for not "getting it." Corporate humor is like play humor. When I go to a play and someone has a mildly humorous one-liner, the place will erupt in a blaze of laughter that will leave me thinking, "Am I missing something?" This feeling is squared for any type of presentation, where my coworkers will carry on like it's Lenny Bruce at the front of the boardroom, and not some unfunny suit pulling zingers from the "Laughter Is the Best Medicine" section of Readers Digest.

Rat in a Maze. This strange situation happened to me yesterday. I'm temping in a major corporation that has dozens of floors in a large office building. The elevators at lunch time are packed, and the overhead floor counter is on the fritz. Most people have been working here a long time and can tell by the floor lobby when to get off. I'm working on the 24th floor. We pass the 22nd floor, and the elevator is still packed. The doors open again--I've never seen anyone get off on the 23rd floor, so I get out.

It looks like my lobby. Doors look the same. I walk in. Ah, yes--this is my floor. Same reception area. Same-looking people who nod knowingly at me as I pass and nod back. I keep walking through the maze of hallways. This floor is so huge that I expect to see Jack Nicholson chasing me with an axe and get the urge to leave a trail of bread crumbs when I leave my desk. But I'm getting there. I turn the corner. Wait a minute--who's sitting at my desk? That isn't me! That isn't the gum-cracking woman from Long Island sitting next to "me" either! I'm having an out-of-body experience! I feel like Poppa Bear! Who's been eating my porridge?

Then it hits me. This is the 23rd floor, and this whole damn place is such a cookie-cutter affair in terms of design and the employees that I couldn't even tell until I reached my own personal space. And, no, I did not have a bottle of cough medicine for lunch.