A Temp Remembers

As part of my personal archiving project, I recently came across a cache of old files from my time in grad school in NYC. Among these files were documents from a temp job I held at an investment bank in 2000, which became, briefly, a full-time job. There were stories I’d jotted down, artifacts, pilfered printouts, articles, even photographs. I collected them all, scanned them, and wrote an introduction to what has become a hardcover volume in my archive, titled A Temp Remembers.

I thought it might be of interest to share that introduction here, a reflection on this sliver of my past life. Names and identifying details have been changed.

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A Temp Remembers

From 2000 to 2003, I worked off and on as a temp for the CEO of Global Investment Bank and his wife: Bill and Trixie Donner. I got the temp job in the ordinary way, through a temp agency, and worked there for a few months one summer and then on Fridays during graduate school (July 2000 - May 2001). After I finished my coursework, they hired me full-time as one of seven personal assistants (April 2002 - January 2003). I needed health insurance, so I took the job. My cubicle was in an open office with all the other assistants on the thirty-ninth floor of 5551 Sixth Avenue. 

The job was tedious and absurd. Each day I transcribed endless voice memos from Mrs. Donner on microcassette tapes that were delivered to the office every morning by Colin, their driver, a crass, ruddy former NYC cop. I was asked to do things like catalog old bras for donations, step on and off a new digital scale to “break it in,” and type up correspondence on Mrs. John L. Strong stationery “from” their Maltese terrier, Terrine, to other dogs on the Upper East Side. I spent a lot of time updating biographical information for the artists in the Donners’ large art collection, calling and writing to people I’d tracked down online to see if they were dead yet. 

When Mrs. Donner began writing a mystery novel, I had to type out her illegible longhand drafts each day and print them out triple-spaced, in 14-pt font, for her ongoing edits. The novel was on auto-pilot for publication due to her money and connections, which nearly pushed me, a newly minted yet unpublished MFA, over the edge. 

Colin leered and tried to engage me in inappropriate conversations. Once, when Terrine was in the office and sitting on my lap, Colin leaned over my shoulder and whispered that he was jealous of the dog.

What a strange and funny job this was. The Donners’ wealth and privilege were staggering to twenty-three-year-old me, my first glimpse of that kind of life: a life where an assistant was urgently dispatched to figure out if Gorham Chantilly flatware had a fish fork among its pieces; a life where Terrine got his own seat on the Concorde when they traveled to London. I’d pack up boxes of the random things they ordered to be FedExed to their home in the south of France (cans of baked beans, boxes of Uncle Sam’s cereal), then I’d take the subway back to my grad-student apartment in Morningside Heights. 

Through it all, I kept notes. I printed out extra copies of some of the wackier memos and messages and slid these into a file folder labeled Nonsense. I tucked a handful of the microcassettes into my bag. Had I signed an NDA? Doubtful, but I wouldn’t have cared much even if I had.

When I eventually quit to take a job as an adjunct professor at Fordham, it felt like--it was--an escape. “We won’t let you go that easily!” Mrs. Donner trilled aggressively on my last day--her version of goodbye. I think she assumed I’d be back at some point. But I knew I never would. 

Years passed without my thinking about the Donners, though some of the stories from my time with them--the dog correspondence; the scale; an event planner imprisoned for embezzlement; Colin’s creepy leering--I told a thousand times. (Were Colin’s comments #metoo? I’m too old to see these interactions as anything but a good story to tell.) The stories I told had lives of their own, unconnected to the people themselves. It didn’t really matter what happened to the Donners and their stable of assistants, because they lived in my memory only as they were during that time, trapped in the amber of my New York life, a time period as precious and exquisitely preserved as any gemstone.    

And yet: of course their lives went on. 

A quarter-century later, as part of my ongoing personal-archiving project, I recently stumbled upon artifacts from this period in an old file box in my office closet. A stack of messages and emails, several pages of my own recollections, two sealed envelopes of those microcassettes, a handful of photos of the office I took with my old point-and-shoot camera. No digital versions of these items exist. Though I worked there only for a short time, the experiences were formative, and I realized these things probably deserve a place in the archive. 

Newly re-immersed in this time period and planning this introduction, I decided to finally google the Donners. This is what I found: 

Mrs. Donner died in 2024 at age 88. She published two mystery novels and a children’s book. (I have her demanding, drawling voice on that handful of microcassettes. If I played them, would I summon her?) 

One of the six other assistants, the kindest one, from Tasmania, lost her thirty-six-year-old only son to a brain tumor in 2016. The other assistants--unfindable online, no threads of connection to follow.

Mr. Donner lives on, at least 90 now, preparing for the end of his life. 

In 2025, part of the Donners’ art collection was consigned to Big Auction House. An article written by a curator at the auction house described how they came to have the collection: they received only a terse email and a few photographs of art on the walls of a New York City home. There was an invitation to view the artwork. The curator arrived at the house on Fifth Avenue, only to realize the “Bill” they’d arranged to meet was Bill Donner, renowned art collector, who led her all around the house as he described the pieces. Not long after, the art was taken down, boxed up, and sent away to be auctioned off. 

An article in Business Tycoon Magazine reported that a tech executive bought that Fifth Avenue home later the same year for $15M. Just another property bought and sold. 

These are facts that have nothing to do with me. 

But weirdly, because of that old stint as a temp, I can still feel the quiet of that co-op. Even more than the brocade furnishings and gilded dining room, more than the dim, wood-paneled library where Mr. Donner kept his vast collection of history books, even more than the elevator and the separate entrance for staff, that quiet, to me, was the ultimate sign of wealth. Inside that home, I was still in New York; but this was a different New York. The draperies were heavy and always closed; you’d never know Central Park was across the street, its dense trees shivering in the wind. A different version of me walked through those rooms, past those gold-framed paintings. She moved books around in those libraries. She left through the staff entrance with a brawny, suited driver and sat in the passenger seat of a black car. 

She didn’t leave a trace of herself behind. 

There are no grand lessons to be learned here, no wise moral. Only this: paths cross; lives intersect, briefly, then go on in different directions. That’s life. City life, especially. Most people never look back--but that’s not me. I’ve carried so much of this forward because collecting stories and memories is what I do. The small moments of this odd, short-term temp job don’t mean very much on their own, but together, they’re a window into a specific time and place. I was once a city girl who wore suits from Gabe’s to the C-suite of an investment bank to do ridiculous tasks, a girl who resented the absurdities and couldn’t, back then, see that the experience was one that could only happen to someone very young, before life really took shape, took hold. Experiences like this are the entire point of being young, but you only understand this much, much later. 

This is how I lived some of the days of my life. These are some small things that happened to me during this sharp sliver of time. You can hear the ghost of my past self speaking through these notes, artifacts, and images. This collection holds some wisdom after all.