Sepia Summer Job

My memories are usually in colour. These vary depending on the emotions the events imprinted in me. Some are in crisp vivid colors. Others are drawn in subdued misty shades. There is a variety of intensity of lighting in each of them. Some are in black and white and some in a single colour of varying hues. The memory of my summer work in 1971 is of the latter. I call it my sepia summer job.

I worked at Statistic Canada transferring information from completed census forms onto computer cards with a pencil. I recall it was a well-paying student job, but so mind-numbing that I cannot remember what I did exactly. All I have in the part of my brain where such things are stored are snapshots of the place I worked in and people I worked with.

I see a large room with old wooden desks placed a fair distance apart. These were no doubt occupied by other students, but I remember none of them and could not tell you if I ever interacted with them, although, of course, I must have on occasion. The only face I remember clearly was that of our supervisor, an elderly gentleman, seated at his wooden desk, slightly larger than ours, but not enclosed in an office. His position was that of a clerk like mine was, but with a few digits added to his job designation. He was there to answer our questions if we hit a snag, which rarely happened because the work was so straight-forward, and to make sure that we worked diligently.

The overall impression it left in me is like a drawing in a Dickens novel: a schoolmaster supervising students doing an extremely long exam with pencils in hand. No one is speaking. There is absolute silence.  A clock is ticking ever so slowly in the background, so slowly in fact that I would not be surprised if it stopped altogether and left us frozen in time: a sepia snapshot in an old dusty photo album.