The Castle Island lot was just across the approach end of runways 04L/04R at Logan International, and the sight of the jets arriving low overhead -- a source of both inspiration and frustration -- kept things interesting on those days when the stench of asphalt-fried guano had most of us in that desperate, what-am-I-doing-here mode. Southie being Southie, more than a few of my fellow drivers were illegals from Dublin, and I remember once how the sight of a green and white Aer Lingus 747, like a huge floating bar of Irish Spring, had everyone cheering and clapping. Years later, based at Logan and flying commuter planes, I'd bank down the channel and pivot my wing around that very same processing lot, looking down (sometimes, even, as a ship would be unloading) and recalling quite vividly the interior smell of a brand-new '86 Subaru wagon.

Eventually I had short-lived stints as a courier (both by foot and car), stockroom clerk and even a stereo-speaker repair technician. Starting in 1988 I went through a rapid-fire series of temp jobs. I'd signed up at a couple of agencies, one or both of which would call at 7 a.m. to offer me this or that degrading, spirit-breaking position for the next week or so. Often enough I'd turn them down and go back to sleep, an option regrettably not among the workplace customs that carry over later in life. The go/no-go choice came down to little more than how much pocket money I needed. I was living with my parents, and my only mandatory expense was the $169.96 monthly payment on my burgundy 1987 Hyundai Excel. To this day, thanks to five depressing years of tearing coupons from a payment book, I still remember that amount exactly.

If you've ever dabbled in temp jobs, you'll understand how such assignments can be far more traumatizing than anything withstood during childhood, adolescence or full-blown adulthood. I'll happily endure the worst fifth-grade pants-pulling episode, high school hazing, and a hundred more airline furloughs before I ever again subject myself again to temp work. Temps are the workplace bottom-feeders, brought in to sort, file and rearrange the spillover of corporate America, which consists of millions upon millions of 8.5-by-11 sheets of office paper that need to be put into one incredibly tedious order or another. More than 10 years after my last assignment, my alphabetizing skills still attest dutifully to the number of $5.50-an-hour filing positions I held.

One such assignment took place at a downtown Boston firm that maintained thousands of student loan records. My job was to dig out a file -- a fat manila envelope stuffed with data -- and either add, subtract or swap various pages. The pages awaiting placement filled an entire shopping carriage that had been wheeled into the windowless, eighth-floor storage area I worked in. The files were arranged alphabetically; the paperwork within by number. Thus, my numerical and letter sequencing skills were put to test simultaneously, a kind of worst-of-both-worlds scenario and nightmare embodiment of the average temp's job description. Usually I toiled as instructed, repeating identical tasks over and over until my arms began to remind me of the insanely repetitive, anthropomorphic motions of the meat-wrapping machine I used to watch at the supermarket as a little kid. When it all became too much, I'd walk over to the garbage chute and hurl an entire file or two into the basement dumpster.

Once in a while there were openings for jobs that required actual standing or walking. These were, to me, the holy grail of temp work, free from the wrist-crippling world of filing. Gone were the sounds of paper -- the shuffling, the crackling, the sound of an index finger counting through corners of white stock -- noises that have a water-torture effect when you've heard nothing else over the course of a 40-hour week. For one five-day stretch I handed out promotional fliers at the Hynes Convention Center during a computer show. The freedom born of a job that did not revolve around the sequential arrangement of numbers or letters was liberating. I could stand in the doorway, near the info desk, or even wander at whim through the crowd of hello-my-name-is conventioneers, presenting my handouts to whoever seemed friendly or good-looking enough to warrant one.

Now and then a chance for full-fledged manual labor came up. A department store over in Everett needed a group of temps to dismantle and haul out an immense pile of scrap metal in its rear parking lot. There were a half dozen of us: myself and five recent parolees from the Billerica House of Corrections as part of a work-release thing. They all knew each other and had nicknames like "Chap," "Bupper," and "Flip." They were decent enough people, though each could pull his weight, measured in pounds of scrap metal, much better than I could. Unsupervised, much of the day revolved around whatever duty-shirking entertainment can be had from a pile of rusted girders and poles, such as playing baseball with stones and a bat-shaped section of pipe.

The jailbirds made me suspect there was a whole culture of temp work out there. Rough-cut types got the heavy labor assignments, while students and people like me got the paper pushing. Both were shitty jobs, but at least the sweaty stuff gave you some exercise and kept you away from the offices and their full-time staff, whose sense of pride and accomplishment, I might add, was tapped directly from the misfortunes of the only people whose tasks were more meaningless than their own: the temp workers. The ex-cons were welcome company after the snide comments and unctuous smirks of innumerable office managers.

So I started requesting the heavy stuff, and getting it. Collar-wise, the transition from faux white to true blue was cathartic, and certainly kept me from hanging myself or skipping a car payment. I helped assemble the racks of a new shoe store in East Boston; I moved pallets; I unloaded trailers. The days flew by.

My life as a temp lasted more than three years. During much of this period I was also flight instructing on the side. I'd earned my instructor's license up at Beverly and was teaching freelance, driving out to airports and putting fliers on people's Cessnas and Pipers. Flight instruction, serious as it might sound, was essentially a non-job that netted about seven grand a year, necessitating a second and almost equally dismal income. One day I'd be shooting ILS approaches and teaching some rich gynecologist how to fly in the fog; the next morning I'd be shoveling bark mulch onto a truck.

Looking back, I find it hard to believe that by 1990, only a short time removed from the days of moving Subarus and flinging people's financial aid folders into the trash, I'd be an airline pilot. But to marvel in that, I suppose, is to measure everything in terms of employment -- to see and realize oneself solely in the context of a job, field, profession. For what it's worth, I went on to do exactly what I wanted to do. I was never apprehensive about the hot-and-heavy career that was coming at me full speed. Others maybe aren't so blessed, if indeed (another round of layoffs just announced) that's the applicable term.

And all of us, for better or worse, progress to the ubiquitous "so what do you do?" of the cocktail party. Not that I've ever been to a cocktail party, but the trick is, unavoidably and cynically enough, to have an answer you're genuinely proud of. Or, if nothing else, an answer that sounds that way.

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