In late 1978 I was out of a job again after the CETA-funded program I'd been working on ran out of funding. At that time, being 26, and having picked up career skills that I thought might allow me to work in magazine publishing, I no longer embraced the idea of being unemployed. Two or three years earlier I would have found some marginal way of supporting myself, like doing yard work, or picking fruit in the Hood River Valley, or selling flowers on the streets of downtown Portland, but those options no longer seemed viable. I had changed.
While looking for a new job on a magazine or local newspaper, I registered with Manpower. Everyone's heard of Manpower, and I figured I might be contacted for a temporary assignment so I'd have some cash coming in. And Manpower did contact me! I was to work a three-day job, from 6:00AM to 9:00AM each day, and I would use my own car. I was supposed to park at a designated lookout point on I-80 North and count traffic.
What were they thinking?
I was provided with two clickers, a pad and a couple pencils. The clickers had a crude plastic tumbler that counted off a number every time you pressed a metal tab with your thumb. Because I was right-handed, the clicker in my left hand was for counting trucks, and the clicker in my right hand was for cars. From the top of the hour you worked a 15-minute interval and then stopped for 5 minutes, and then at 20 past the hour you started again for another 15 minutes, so that you ended up with 3 counting sessions per hour with 3 breaks of 5 minutes each. At the beginning of your break, you were supposed to write down the numbers from your clickers on to the pad and then reset the counters. The purpose was to monitor traffic volume because a hospital was situated close to the highway and the EPA believed there may have been a pollution risk to the patients. In 1978, late 1978, it was hard to imagine that there wasn't equipment to count traffic---you know, those leaden boxes that the Highway and Safety Department leaves on the shoulder of the road. And I believe the equipment was available, but maybe it had malfunctioned and the people running the study couldn't get a replacement soon enough. They needed a human car counter, and so they called me.
Traffic was light and easy to record between 6:00 AM and 7:00 AM, mostly trucks at that hour. But between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM I was clicking away like a fool, a perverse and frenetic Morse code. At first I tried to be honest with the numbers, but, hmm... no one was watching me, and I quickly learned that I could extend my 5-minute breaks by averaging how many cars/trucks passed in a minute and then accounting for the half hour in which that minute occurred. It was a little tricky because during the first half hour (6:00 - 6:30) more trucks than cars were counted, but in the final half hour, cars outnumbered trucks approximately 12:1.
The best part of this easy but absurdly demeaning work was that I was treated to watching the sunrise every morning for three days in a row. It was still dark when I arrived at my post to count cars, but in the next couple hours I would study the world as it gradually filled with light, observe the nearly imperceptible changes of shades in twilight, the creeping certainty of dawn and the miracle of each daybreak. What more could one ask for than to witness the beginning of each day? I would bring a thermos of tea or buy coffee. On my 5-minute breaks I'd drink the tea or coffee and read "The Magic Mountain" which usually prolonged the breaks by a few minutes and I'd have to compensate as mentioned for the missed cars and trucks.
And by the time I finished each day, I had already done a little work, gotten a little money, and I still had the whole day ahead of me. When Manpower gave me my next assignment---a dreary bank job downtown checking stacks of computer printouts for a programming bug and numerical errata---I asked them if they still needed anyone to count cars . . . and trucks . . .
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