"JustIn' Time"?

Coal for Christmas

There is cheap and then there is law firm cheap. Then there is the law firm that I work for. My employer, the law firm also known as Labatory Suckaroo, is starting to explore new boundaries in the realm of law firm cheapness, by, among other things, threatening to cut off our internet access, delaying our right to receive benefits, refusing to pay overtime, and cutting off our heat on the weekends. Ah...the christmas spirit is alive and well at this place...

To bring you up to speed, I'm still (for the time being) in charge of the document review project which is going strong and heading towards trial. However, we are still knee deep in documents to review. Depositions are coming up so we have to work weekends in order to review all the docs before then. Weekend work is generally a good thing in the temp world - it means more hours which means more pay. Remember that we don't get sick days, vacation days, etc., so weekend work is a good chance to make some extra dough. So last week, when I had my sit-down with the CFO of the firm, (an italian-american who bears an extraordinary likeness to Joe Pesci and answers the question: what would happen if Nicky Santoro decided to stop being a Las Vegas gangster and become a corporate tool), I was delighed to learn that weekend work would be available. However, Joey Fish make it clear to me that it was a privilege to get weekend work and he wanted to see some results (or else?) from the firm granting highly educated and trained attorneys the privilege to tool away for them at $32 an hour. (We also had a "discussion" about how to improve productivity, since Mr. Pesci/Santoro had concerns about the number of documents we were reviewing per hour. I asked whether it would be appropriate for me to bring a whip to work. Mr. Pesci/Santoro didn't think this was funny and for a second, I think I saw him consider the idea).

OK, so anyway, we have weekend work. While I would rather be at home, I'm glad to be given the opportunity to make some extra money. So, when I came in to the office on Saturday morning, I was generally in a good mood despite missing the extra sleep. The other attorneys on my team who also decided to come in were also happy to get the extra hours. However, we soon learned that the extra hours would come at a cost: our extremities. Our wonderfully generous law firm had forgotten to mention that they wouldn't be paying to heat our room for the weekend. Last saturday, if you remember was the day it rained and was about 40 degree - eventually it snowed. We showed up to work wet and then had to spend the rest of the day in a freezing room. Literally, people were shivering at their desks. One attorney stayed in her winter jacket all day and typed with gloves on. By 3 pm, when the sun started to go down, it started becoming unbearably cold. I was wearing my sweater, a coat, and a hoodie sweatshirt and still was freezing because the room was probably in the lows 50s/high 40s. In order to work, I had to continually blow on my hands or they went numb. In short, it wasn't a fun time.....I'm lucky I didn't get terribly sick.

Now, you may be asking; why didn't you say anything J-dawg? Why didn't you complain or ask for heat? These are all good questions and in a world where people treated their workers with dignity and respect, such questions would be rightly brought. Why didn't I bring up the issue? Well, I'll tell you why. As I said, by around 4 pm, it started to get unbearable - no one could work. One of my team members posted something on facebook about freezing her ass off at work and a paralegal who is actually one of the few decent human beings at the firm, responded by asking what she could do to help. She also asked why I didn't ask to do anything about it. A reasonable question since I am technically in charge.

Spurred on by the paralegal, I finally took the plunge into the insanity that is Suckoroo's HR/Short term attorney department and emailed first the facilities person (out of office reply message) then the assistant HR person (another out of office reply), then the head HR person. I knew I was starting up a shitstorm asking for a basic necessity such as heat, but what could i do? We had to come in tomorrow and face this cold and something had to be done.

So, anyway, after I sent out the email requesting some heat, I didn't get a response right away. At 6 am the next day, I got a response from the head of HR saying that she was sorry but she couldn't get us heat "because high rises like this one turn off the heat on the weekend". What a bullshit answer. Yes, I know high rises turn off the heat on the weekend, but you pay rent, you can ask them to turn on the heat and fucking pay the extra $200/300 to heat the space. But, no, you don't want to do that. You don't want to spend the money to treat your workers like human beings - you'd rather let them freeze and be uncomfortable than spend the money to heat the space. OK, fine, I said. Why fight this battle? I'll just suck it up and come in and suffer for a few hours. I knew it wasn't worth the fight. So, Sunday was spent the same way as Saturday; sitting at our desks in the cold (luckily it wasn't as bad) blowing on our hands and wearing our winter coats while trying to get our feet from freezing up......

Flashforward to today. More weekend work coming up. I hadn't even really bothered to pursue the heat thing, hoping that maybe it would work itself out. Then the temperature starting dropping thursday night - and it got colder and colder - tomorrow is supposed to be the coldest day of the year. Still, I did nothing - I'm so beaten down by these people that I just accepted my fate and started to plan what I could wear to stay warm. The paralegal, god bless her soul, decided to fight and what a battle she had. After some scathing emails and getting cursed out and yelled at by HR, the paralegal finally got us heat. I heard the story second hand from her but apparently, it was a pitched battle to get us the heat. After numerous conference calls and emails back and forth, the firm relented and spent the extra couple hundred dollars to heat the room. So, bottom line, we will have heat tomorrow, which is good because it's supposed to be like 20 degrees...the firm is not happy about having to pay for heat and sees it like they are giving us something extra; the paralegal in question had to spend some important bargaining chips to get us the heat and is now wary of going to battle for us in the future so in some ways, it's a loss. Really, it's just absurdthe way this firm operates and they ought to feel shame about this entire thing. For me, it's just another day in Shit Law. At least I don't have to wear my hat, scarf, and gloves at my desk tomorrow though, so I got that going for me.

the executioner

I haven't been posting for a couple week because, well, I've been busy firing people. Last time I posted, we had 20 attorneys. Now we have 13 left. The call came down from the top to make the cuts - "productivity" concerns. In other words, the partners at the firm did not want to shell out any more $$ to staff their cases properly. Instead, they found it best to strip down the cases to the bare minimum of attorneys needed to run the case. Then, they can start to extract every ounce of productivity of the people who are left -who, by the way, are now scared to death. As the chinese say "if you want to scare the monkey, kill the chicken" or something like that...Eventually, I'm going to go into detail about each of the 3 rounds of firing that I went through - but here's a quick list of those who got the boot:
Y - The Loud Typer - Mannish-Woman. I finally went to the HR and said this was intolerable.
JS - Pill-popping 60 year woman who kept falling asleep at her desk.
X - annoying JAP from Brooklyn who constantly complained about not me not taking her suggestions.
All of these three people, I was delighted to see go. In fact, I orchestrated much of their departure - as HR wanted to cut other people who were model workers if not the best coders in existence.
The collateral damages - four solid but not that efficient coders. I feel bad about them. But in two of the cases, it really wasn't my call. HR kept calling for their heads. Two of them were very nice woman and I felt bad bout them going.
By the way, the agency has the amazing tact to call some of the departed while they were in the office with me. (typically, in a doc review, the firm itself does not fire; the firm tells the agency who hired the reviewer and the agency tells them it's over). So, uh, that made for an awkward situation last night.
The terrible

The Loud Typer

Someone should make a reality show about what happens on a document review because when you put 15-20 lawyers in a small room and then have them compete to stay on a project, "interesting" things start to happen. Your average lawyer is already a stressed-out, prickly individual who is more difficult to get along with than the typical person. The types of attorneys who are selected to work on document reviews are even more stressed out than normal because most of us take such jobs out of desperation to pay off crippling student debt, we get no benefits (and thus are more likely to get physically ill), and there is always the likelihood that the project could end early, thus forcing us to scurry for another temp position so that we can make the next rent payment. Add in the fact that we are crowded into these rooms like Japanese commuters on a Tokyo 8 AM subway ride and you create a cauldron of stress - the combined effect of which is probably the reason why document reviews have a tendency to meander into the absurd. (and thus, this blog.)

Out of my team of document reviewers, I have three coders in particular who cause me constant stress. As luck would have it, they all sit next to each. One of them, J2, you may be familiar with as she is the one with the under-sized son who likes to work past 8 pm so she can afford her son's height-enhancing shots. J2 also seems to have a tremendous problem with decision-making and thus, has the (very) annoying habit of continually asking inane questions and then complaining to other people when I tell her that as an attorney she should be able to make decisions on her own as to whether a particular document is relevant. The other two, let's call them X and Y, cause me stress in a different way since, while on their own, they are relatively OK, the two of them can't seem to get along with each other. Thus, the incident I have dubbed the "The Loud Typer Episode"

First, let's describe the characters in our little drama. X, actually, isn't so bad. She's a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, fairly smart, and has a pretty good sense of humour. Occasionally, she gets on my nerves with her constant gossipping, but generally I like her, and although her manner can be somewhat grating, I find her relatively tolerable. Y, in a different context, also wouldn't be that bad. She's a middle-aged women; very large in statute to the point that she is physically imposing (at least to me). She has a mannish appearance to the degree that one coder had to question me about her gender. Nevertheless, she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders and was pretty quiet and didn't bother anyone. However, little did I know that disaster was brewing between the two of them....

The whole messy affair started when we started running out of documents to code. Having documents to review is the bread-and-butter of any document review team; it's what we live on and as long as there are documents coming in, then we know that we are safe from being laid off. Unfortunately, for us, the documents in our case were being produced to us in a staggered fashion and thus, we were only getting roughly 3,000 documents coded a week; an amount that could easily be coded in a day or two leaving the rest of week frighteningly empty of work to be done. To make up for this gap, it was suggested that we give the coders special projects to work on so that we can justify keeping them on. On one such special project, I made the catastrophic mistake of putting X and Y together to work collaboratively on producing a memo.

In hindsight, I should cut myself some slack as I didn't know what an extraordinarily hyper-sensitive person Y was at the time I assigned her work with X. That fact was soon made apparent to me when Y unilaterally decided to work on the project over the weekend (without pay) and then produced a "memo" to me on Monday which was pure crap. I politely told Y to continue working with X to improve the memo and to get back to me with a more finished product. However, when I checked back in with Y later that week, I found that nothing had changed. In a moment of ill-advised frustration, I made the mistake of telling Y that she should work on something else and that X should take over the project. A couple minutes later, after Y handed over her work product to X, I heard X tell her colleague that her work was not that good. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but that sentence unleashed a world of hurt on me that almost got me fired.....

Unbeknownest to me at the time, Y had a side of her that bordered on the psychotic. Immediately after the incident above, she rushed up to HR to complain about X and me. At some point in her meeting with HR, she mentioned the word "harassment" and that's when all hell broke loose. The whole story about how I got called up to HR to explain the situation, how Y confronted me the next day screaming about how I had "embarrassed and humiliated her", how HR tried to pin the blame on me when I suggested that it would be best to move X and Y and Y called my attempt to move her as harassment is probably a blog post for another day ("The Harasser" - forthcoming), but let's just say that the utterance of the word "harassment" threw me into a world of shit with HR, a vortex of pain and stress of which I have barely escaped from....Obviously, despite being a hyper-sensitive sociopath who couldn't write a memo to save her life, Y had learned a valuable survival mechanism in this corporate jungle: when in trouble at work, say the word "harass" to HR and all your problems will magically disappear.

Flash-forward a couple weeks later and I get an email in my inbox from Y. Now this in itself,
is not unusual as ever since the "memo" episode, Y emails me all the time, particularly when I send out my QC reports (quality control reports that list the errors the coders have made). Y has also learned that in the corporate law world, everything is done by paper so you have to survive by building up a paper-trail that shows you are a competent employee. On the other hand, firms build up a paper-trail so that they can justify firing you so you've got to be alert to anything the firm sends you regarding your performance. Ironically, this is exactly what happened to me at Bloomberg, where from the first month I started, I was consistently bombarded with weekly email from my supervisors warning me about my sub-par performance. Again, another post for another day . . .

In Y's email, she notes that she has been concerned by the volume level of X's typing and thinks it might be a good idea if the two of them got new keyboards. Not incidentally, the same complaint had been made to me by X about Y's typing the prior week! Now, while X and Y sit about a few feet away from me, I don't spend my day monitoring the typing volume of team members. If I had to pick, I'd say that Y is probably the loud typer as her mannish hands probably result in a very heavy keystroke. In addition, I've noticed that some days Y comes in a very bad mood and starts slamming her hands down on the keyboard. So all in all, I'd probably say that the offender here is Y and not X.

However, in order to avoid any complications that might involve having to get HR involved again (as I would rather chop off my left nut then have to contact HR about anything), I decide it's best to take Y up on her offer and I order new keyboards for both of them. This time, I try to keep everything in writing and I have the two of them come pick up their keyboards (neither of which seem any different from the old ones). The new keyboards don't make a fuck of a difference. The two are still getting on each other's nerves, but at least it's not going up to HR, so the situation has eased into an careful detente; it's relatively easy to ameliorate the situation by reasoning with X to get her to calm down. With the move coming up this weekend (see yesterday's post "Packed in Like ..") I may finally have the chance to separate the two of them in a way that does not get me reported to HR for being a harasser.

Still, at some point, things are going to have to come to a head with Y. As "team leader", I am in the vulnerable position of being "in charge" and also responsible whenever some goes to complain about my leadership. They wouldn't fire a permanent worker in my position if an underling complained, but I'm not a perm; I'm in the same position as all the other temps here. Thus, I'm in the awkward position of having to keep my "underlings" happy so that I don't get fired. At any moment, I know that Y could go off and run to HR is something goes wrong. It's not a pleasant feeling to have on a day-to-day basis.

In reality, Y is actually probably an OK person - In fact, it was been my experience that, in generally, people are good and want to do good. For the most part, it's just the "lessons" we learn and the trauma we suffer as we struggle to survive in this hyper-competitive world that makes us "bad." I don't know Y's past but I can guess that there is some real pain lurking there as she's obviously been through the corporate law sausage-factory a couple times. I'd like to reason with her and reach an understanding but generally, I found that there is no reasoning with a sociopath like Y; the best thing to do is just try to avoid her and work on building a paper-trail so that I can get rid of her when the times come. My masters have taught me well.

Packed in Like a Can of Fuckin' Sardines

Although I don't get any big "B" Benefits with my current job, (e.g. health care, sick days, vacation time, etc.) my status as team leader on the project grants me some small "b" benefits in which I like to indulge. The most critical of these benefits is the authority to organize the seating arrangement of the room. I have shrewdly exploited this power so that I don't have anyone sitting next to me. Having this extra space allows me to strew my assorted papers and sundries about. It also provides the comfortable amount of space to let out a discreet fart when the need arises without offending my colleagues too much. Alas, nothing good lasts forever as today we learned this happy state of affairs is soon to end.

This morning we were told that we have to vacate the second room that I have been using to house 6 of my 20 team members (I privately call this adjacent room the "devil's island" because I exiled all the faces I would rather not see on a day-to-day basis into that room). Now, these lucky 6 team members will be consolidated into my already over-crowded room, a rectangular space of approximately 400 square feet. For those of you counting at home, that's going to be about 20 square feet of space per person for a space that most of spend at least 50 hours a week living in. That's 2/5 square foot of space per hour. Essentially, we will be spending 5/8 of our waking hours in the equivalent of a semi-crowded subway car.

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming as HR and IT people had been scurrying in and out of my room for the past few days on mysterious missions of counting chairs and asking for seating charts. Of course, when D asked me to fill out a seating chart for the room, she did not tell me that the purpose of doing so was related to moving people about. I'm only team leader here and information is strictly on a need-to-know basis with D. I should be happy they told me before just going ahead and moving all the desks around over the weekend.

Whatever the case, it's now clear that we fourteen on the mainland are going to have to share our space with the 6 exiles from Devil's Island. A little about the current set-up of my room: Basically, the room is a large rectangle approximately 15 by 25 feet. Fittingly, a large rectangular table dominates the room and 8 team members sit along this table, including myself. (I probably should have placed myself at the head of the rectangular table but I did not want my back turned to the door as such a placement would allow people entering the room to see what I was looking at on my computer. From experience, I have learned that the most important thing about your office set-up is making sure your computer screen faces in so you can search the Internet in peace without fear of having your superior catch you in the act of viewing porn.) Besides this table, there are a number of small tables that face up against the wall. Six people sit at these desks with only the wall as their scenery for the day. I have nothing against these people (in fact, these six are my least troublesome charges as I guess having them face the wall instinctively makes them more passive and subject to discipline) but these were the only seats available. Anyway, you get the point. We are not exactly swimming in space here.

To add to the fun, they are adding 15 people to the room where the six exiled coders once sat to work on another project that is starting up. So all in all, we are going to have 35 people in a space that has barely managed to fit 20. I won't be in charge of those 15 people but they will be sharing space with me and my team. Good times!

It's my experience that one of the crucial drivers toward madness is population density. People start getting crazy when you don't give them enough space. It's our animal instinct to need space to breath (liebenstraum?) and when we don't have proper space, it puts stress on the body, and adds mental stress to people who are already stressed out. Although I've never experienced truly stressful crowding conditions on a document review, I've heard the stories. Fights breaking out between neighbors, people complaining about body odor, staplers being thrown, etc. Already, most of these people are a couple bad days away from a complete nervous breakdown - overcrowding is yet another stress they have to deal with.

The news was broken to us by LC, who is the firm's maintenance and facilities HR person. She's a callipygian - A word I have always desperately wanted to use in print - woman in her early 40s. As her intelligence appears to hover around that of a macaw, (a fact that has nothing to do with the fact that she is black, only that she chose a career in HR), she's perfectly suited for a role in HR. When she came in today announcing the move, and one of the coders asked where the people would all fit, she pointed to a space where there was clearly a computer and said that's there space "right there." When I pointed out that J sat there, LC responded, "no, there's no one sitting there." Seeing that it was pointless to argue, I simply nodded in agreement at that point. What's the point, really? Some way or another, they are going to find a way to squeeze us all in so that we are nice and close to each other.

My most annoying charge J2 then piped up "does this mean that we can get more money for the inconvenience?" - to which the curt and predictable response was no, you cannot. J2 might as well have asked if she could borrow $100,000 from the firm to go on a meth binge. There are no raises in this world - You take what the bosses give you and if you're lucky, they'll keep on the project just up to the date when they can legally fire you without giving you benefits. If you're unlucky, they'll cut you from the project when the partners decide that they need to cut costs. If you're truly unlucky, they'll call you back to be team leader after they fire you. I kid, I kid.

At this point, I imagine LC wanted to soften the blow to the team so she started going on about she would be happy to do anything for us to make us more comfortable includng adjust the air temperature in the room and get us more fans. More than once, she singled me out and said that I should be letting her know when there are problems in the room. "How can I make it better for you guys when you don't let me know"? For a second, I was tempted to point out to her that I had emailed her at least five times about the temperature in the room being too hot - at times, we had to open the door to keep it to a manageable cool - but that, not once had she ever responded to me, but it would be been futile. I simply smiled and nodded my head in agreement like the good puppy-dog I am. Yes m'am, just let me know how much shit you want us to eat and we'll have our plates and knives ready, yes we will!

Thinking about shit then reminded me that we now have 15 more people added to the 80 or so people who currently inhabit the entire floor. That's about 100 people sharing the two shitters available to us. That's going to be two very crowded and smelly commodes . Already, we basically have to line up behind the stall to take our morning steamers. Now we got 15 more assholes to deal with (literally). Even though it was futile, I asked LC if possibly we could gt access to other floors so that we can take our dumps in relative peace. Someone else asked if we could get a porta-potty for the floor. Yes, we all went to law school for this. (For my thoughts on law firms and act (and joys) of defecation, please see yesterday's post.)

It probably does not need mentioning that the firm does not give a shit about overcrowded bathrooms and anything else we coders have to deal with. Again, it's continuously stressed to us that we should be happy to have the privilege of working for them and should thank them for whatever space they provide us and be on our way. The firm doesn't get any money for giving us space - they make money by taking the time we bill and overcharging; that is, when the firm settles the case and the times comes to take their cut of the settlement amount, they make sure that they get paid $300 an hour for work that they paid us $30 an hour to do. Getting extra space costs money and that decreases firm profits. It's better to crowd us all in like sardines an if one of cracks, goes crazy, and then quits, there's another 10 live bodies ready, willing, and eager to take their spot. Hey, you don't like it, hit the bricks, pal! There's people in India that would probably kill their own grandmothers to get your jobs and someday, in the not too distant future, that's exactly what's going to happen.

As a coda to the story, after the dust had settled and it sank in as a reality that the two rooms would now become one, someone brought up the fact that G would now have to come into our room. (While I had not exiled G to the other room, I had placed him there to watch over the coders in that room). Who was going to sit next to the shingles-infested G?!? As we all pondered that question, I happily thought to myself that the firm had not yet taken away my favorite benefit of all. Personally, I think G belongs on the other side of the table from me, as far as possible from not-yet scabbed over skin.

Who pooped in the Breakroom?

I wanted to post more light-hearted faire today as yesterday's post, I now realize, contained a depth of existential angst that could cause depression in a reader. Therefore I will recount an episode that occurred a couple weeks ago while at my current position of "team leader" on a document review project. Behold: the mystery of

Who Pooped in the Breakroom?


Lawyers live in a world of shit. We talk shit to each other, we shuffle shit around on our desks and on our computers, and often times, we get treated like shit (and in turn, treat other people like shit.) It's one big happy shitfest and sooner of later, you are either getting your face shoved in shit or more hopefully, doing the shoving yourself. Perhaps the shit that we deal with as attorney seeps into our subconscious mind and causes some of us to yield to our inner scato-phile. I once heard a story about an Of Counsel at a Big NY Law Firm who liked to work late and then take dumps in the hallway of the firm. Apparently, this scatologically-challenged attorney would also create huge pyramids of toilet paper on the top of the shits he took. Every morning, some poor slob custodian would have to come clean up the turds and the turd edifices he made. The punchline of the story is that the firm in question did not fire this guy even though they had it on tape that this guy was defecating in their hallways. I guess his billables were good.

Ironically enough, the person who told me this story worked for the same firm as the mad-shitter and got laid off last winter. Prior to getting the boot, she had been told that she had no chance of getting fired, because, after all, this was the same firm that kept on a guy that was taking dumps on the firm carpet. I can only guess that her work-product was not as good as the mad-shitter's was.

My "law shit" story is far more mundane and prosiac. A couple weeks ago, I was making my hourly trip to the coffee room to maintain my caffeine levels when I noticed that there were five guys milling around the elevator lobby waving their arms around and talking loudly to each other. Being in my own little world as usual, I ignored the commoition and headed straight for the break-room. However, I was rudely interrupted from my reverie when one of the fellows, who I think works in the mail room, shouted "Pay Attention!." I looked down at the floor and noticed that I had narrowly escaped the fate of stepping in a turd. This particular turn was about 3-4 inches, more long than narrow, and rather brown. From the length of the turd, my guess was that it came from a medium size dog or a very large cat. (It was clear that this piece of shit had not come from a rodent.)

Studying the stinkard from a closer distance, however, I was struck by the possibility that this dookie might have had human origins. There was a certain curvature to the voidance that indicated that it was not animal-borne. Had the mad-shitter returned and was he now targeting plaintiff's law firms and document review caserooms? Had a document reviewer become so fed up with the endless and tedious task of coding and reviewing documents that he (or she) felt the only way to express themselves was to defecate in the elevator lobby and thus, demonstrate to the world, his (or her) opinion of life as a temporary attorney?

These and other pressing questions I pondered while the five men in question argued loudly as to who had made this crap and, more practically speaking, who has responsible for cleaning up said crap. Having analyzed the situation and realizing that I couldnt do much to help, I continued on to the case room, making sure to check that my shoes had not been stained by the Texan. Returning back through the elevator lobby 5 minutes later, I saw that the men had gone their way. The dung, however, remained. I returned back to the room and reported my findings to the rest of the team, politely warning them to please watch their step while walking through the lobby. Collective gasps of disgust greeted the news. There was some ameteur detective work regarding who had made the stinker in question. Eventually, the issue was dropped and some time later, we learned that the poop had been cleaned up.

A week later, rumours started flying around that somone had pooped in the breakroom. Having not seen the turd in the breakroom, at first, I wasn't entirely sure whether this was a new shit or the same old shit. It is, of course, entirely possible that the mad-shitter had struck again, this time, his target was closer to home as the breakroom is where many a weary coder goes to relax, watch ESPN, and bill hours while doing nothing. However, given that the breakroom is almost never empty, I found it hard to believe that the opportunity would have arisen to take a meanie in the room , unless of course, our mysterious defecator had dropped this grumpy in public; but then, this would have surely been noticed. A more likely explanation is that the poop in the breakroom was the same poop as that in the elevator and through the rumour mill, the story had evolved from a simple dingleberry in the elevator room to a massive jake in the breakroom. It was agreed by all that whomever was doing these do-dos was a twisted individual who should be sent home immediately with the instructions to learn how to evacuate their bowels in the proper place. Or alternatively, whoever was bringing their dog to work and letting it release its filth all over the workpace should stop doing so immediately.

As of today, no further turdballs, dingleberries, craps, jakes, shits, or likewise have been found at the worksite. The search for the mad-shitter, however, continues.

Shingles are not just for houses

The Contracting Gig (or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace chicken pox)

I was sitting at home in my 150 ft. square "apartment" on the Lower East Side of Manhattan having a panic attack when I got a call asking me to be a "team leader" for a 3-4 month document review assignment for an unnamed plaintiff's law firm in the city. Being out of work at the time and frantically anticipating a long period of unemployment-fueled depression and anxiety, I readily accepted their terms and signed on at the rate of $40 an hour (no benefits, of course.) For those of you unfamiliar with the legal profession, and even those of you within the legal profession that are unfamiliar with the dark, murky world of document reviewing, a document review is a short-term assignment where a team of attorneys is hired for an indefinite period of time (typically 2-3 months) to review the massive amount of document ejaculated by the opposing party in large, class-action type litigations. Your average law firm either does not have the resources or the desire (typically the latter) to hire permanent workers to carry out the intensely monotonous task of reviewing millions of pages of documents, so they hire temporary workers who are paid by the hour to do this work for them.

Eventually, all these jobs are going to be shipped overseas because an Indian attorney can review and code documents two times faster and ten times cheapers than your average american reviewers. However, for the time being, these jobs are here and they are practically the only thing available to the fraternity of discarded attorneys who make up the detritus of Big Firm law (of which I am a somewhat chagrined member). For me, the whole situation was a bit of twisted irony: the same economic catastrophe that had thrown me out of work in September of 2008 was now providing me employment. It must be written somewhere that the only completely, 100% unavoidable result from an economic collapse is litigation; and it was this litigation that was now putting the chinese take-out on my table (although at the time I didn't have a table because in a 150 ft. apartment that happens to have a piano in it, there really is no room for a table, so I ate most of my meals in bed). But I digress.....

One of main tasks of a document review "team leader", I soon learned, was "managing" a team of a dozen or so attorneys tasked with the tedious job of reviewing the documents in question. Document reviewers, also known as "coders", are a notriously ragtag bunch. They have a reputation of being the dregs of polite legal society; outliers and misfits who "couldn't cut it" in Big Law, J.D.s who passed the bar on the fourth try, and of course, your assorted freaks and borderine psychotic individuals who no self-respecting law firm would let come to any company function. (For the full interets of disclosure, I should note that i readily place myself in the category of misfits and square-pegs-in-round-holes that populate the document review universe. In less than three years since passing the bar, I have had 5 different legal jobs, the last of which ended three weeks prior to the present one with me being called "the worst attorney he had ever seen" after I unceremoniously quit within two days of starting.)

Not all document reviewers are shady individuals with questionable backgrounds and even more questionable work ethic, (again, a group of under-acheivers and shirkers that I would readily place myself in). Some are hard-working, ambitious sorts who, for a variety of reasons, both those self-inflicted and those caused by the fates, find themselves at the mercy of the whims of the short-term attorney (STA) legal market. One such individual by the name of G fit squarely within this category and he, unfortunately, found himself, within the purviews of my little STA kingdom.

G was from Michigan and so of course, he possessed that sort of energetic, whatever-I-can-do-to-help-the-company attitude that seems innate to all midwesterns. I never asked what brought G to New York City, or for that matter, cared to find out. I found it best to keep my charges at a distance - perferable at a far enough distance so that they could not find me to pester me with inane questions about the tasks I had assigned them to complete. I did overhear that G was new to New York City and was living in Washington Heights, a fact to which I could only express my sincerest sympathy. He was also, it appeared, single, and nerdy in that officious, lawyerly-way that so makes so many people hate my fellow members of the bar. Given his lack of statute, his current address in the wilds of the DR, as well as his beta-male demeanour, it was not too much of a guess to deign that G would stay single for the time-being. Given my limited and mostly disastrous forays into the New York dating world, I have found that shortness of height and a lack of any of the signifiers of alpha male status (e.g. a job in "finance", an address on the Upper East Side, etc.) were non-starters with most of the women that inhabited this city. The shortness issue, it appears, is peculiarly a New York thing as when browsing the Internet dating sites for other cities, I don't see the same insistence that ones potential mate be over 5 foot 10. I can only guess that this results from our city being populated by men with an amalgam of Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, or Irish heritage.

Even with his unfortunate handicaps, I found that G proved to be a valuable Lietentant in the somewhat arduous task of managing my team; particularly because of G's habit and willingness to answer any question that any team member might ask, thus saving me from the tiresome task of having to attend to my underlings. For the first few week, I magnamoniously "delegated" a good portion of those tasks typically performed by a team leaders to G, inluding, among other things, checking the work of team members, answering all questions, and heading up the special projects which I had created to keep team members busy and off my back.

But, G, I soon learned, was an ambitous sort. Rather than accept the $32/hour salary that the firm generously granted to him (He should be happy just to have a job! said the HR rep for the firm) for fulfilling the role that rightly should have fallen to me, G lobbied the firm to take him on as a second team leader. Given my own dependence on G, I awkwardly backed G's brazen attempt to get paid what he was worth (How dare he? doesn't he know how bad the economy was?!?), at least, until the powers-that-be asked me why they should pay G extra to do a job that I shoud be doing. At that point, I performed an adroit about-face and maintained that certainly, there was no need to pay G an extra $8 an hour as I was more than up to the task of leading the team.

Duly put back into his place, a chastened (but never sullen) G went back to being my unofficial deputy - a sort of prime minister to my kingship. I grandly apologized for being unable to get him his raise (I did the best I could, man, really, I did! Those bastards!) As a consolation, I told G I would try to get his hours "uncapped" (fyi: team members are not allowed to work more than 50 hours a week for fear that the riffraf JDs would abuse the privilege of working for the firm by racking up hour-upon-hour of billed time; a fear that, I must note, is not without its justification as it is the dream of many a document reviewer to work on an uncapped project where he can while away the hours playing solitaire and checking facebook while billing $40-45 an hours.) However, I had to abandon my efforts to uncap G when the firm resisted. OK, full disclosure, as soon as the firm told me that they would have to think about uncapping G and asked me what purpose uncapping would fulfill, I told them that it was not necessary to uncap and that I would gladly take on any of his extra responsibilties. (Whatever I can do to help the firm save costs! you betcha!)

So, anyway, it's 6 weeks into the project. G is still on the special project; a thankless task that takes an extraordinary amount of tedious effort and concentration and not incidentally is cental t to the entire review. I also assigned one of the more annoying members of the team as his assistant - my rationale being that if I put the two of them together, they would ask questions of each other and thus leave me to post status updates on facebook. The project is difficult-going and I find myself having to get my hands dirty from time-to-time and grace them with my (very) limited feedback. It's a relatively good state of affairs as I have G and J (his mousy assistant, a 60-something, somewhat emotional red-haired woman who is working to save up money so her diminutive son can get his "shots" that he needs to increase his height to normal standards.... Again, the height thing. unavoidable) bothering each other so much that I'm relatively free during the day to relax. I figured I could keep them on this project for another two weeks of bliss.

However, I arrive on Monday morning at my alloted place and there is a troubling email from G in my inbox. After performing my daily morning ritual of checking up on the status update of my facebook "friends" , I check to see why G has sent me an email with the subject line "shingles". I read the email and learn that my trusted deputy doesnt think he can come into today as "it is almost certain" that he has shingles.

Instantly, I know that this is going to create a problem for me to deal with and my Monday is ruined. I anticipate the coming storm: G wants to work so he's clamoring for the firm to let him come in, the other coders, however, being self-protective of their health (as they should be), are not going to want to be put at risk. The firm, I know, doesn't really care what G does, or what happens to the coders should one of them get infected, as long as its ass is covered and it doesn't have to pay anybody anything more than the more than generous $32 an hour it pays to professionals with 7 years of college/post-college education living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Simply put, it's going to be a shit-storm and I'm going to be in the middle taking a huge bite.

For about 15 minutes, I try to put off the inevitable and stave off the impending moutain of stress about to explode in my little kingdom (a kingdom totaling approximately 100 feet in area, and a population of 20 over which I have very little actual authority since essentially, anybody within my realm can go complain to HR about me and I would be in trouble.) After checking my gmail and seeing what's on ESPN, I sigh and write a quick note to G letting him know that "I hope he feels better" and that I will forward his note up to HR.

(The "hope you feel better" line I learned while working at the hellhole that is known as Bloomberg, LP. When I couldn't bear to be tortured by my sadistic team leader T, I would call in sick and inevitably, I would get a brief "hope you feel better" response from T, whose typically emails to me asked contained phrases like "woefully underperforming", "sloppy", and "bad attitude". At least I learned something from that experience. )

Sighing again, I forward G's polite, well-worded, and impeccably spelled letter to D up in HR. This, I know, is going to cause complications because D, for lack of a better word, is, well, an idiot. OK, that's a bit harsh, but I think it's fair to say that she's completely and utterly suited for a role in HR (a far worse thing to say about someone than calling them an idiot, in my opinion). D knows how to CYA and better yet, how to cya the firm and that makes her good at her job and a nightmare for any short-term attorney. What D really excels at is making employees take on the burden of making key decisions and then insulating the firm from blame when the results go awry (see, e.g., the harrassment incident when I attempted to deal with two quarreling co-workers by separating them and then was accused by the firm of harrassment when I devised a plan to move one of the quarrellers into an adjoining room (forthcoming post)). True to form, D waits a while before responding to my email and then tells me to advise him to tell G to stay home if he is "contagious", leaving me with the task of finding out if and to what degree G is contagious and breaking the news to the rest of the team that they have been sitting in a room with a guy who just got diagnosed with an infectious disease for the past three weeks.

Then, I put on a brave face and tell the attorneys present that G is out today and may have shingles. The reaction is surprisingly subdued, but everyone is tense. However, my team member always seem tense, which is probably a side-effect of their lack of health insurance, and a lack of knowing that they have a steady stream of future income since everyone, including myself, could be fired from their job at any moment (Yay, unfettered capitalism! Who needs unions, I say!) An illness for these people means missed work and missed work means not getting paid, which to them means missed rent payments and missed health insurance premiums, if they can afford this at all, which apparently, G could not. I explain that G has not been diagnosed with Shingles yet so there is no need to worry right now.

An hour later, I get an email from G telling me that, indeed, he does have shingles. Attached to this bit of diagnostic information, G also gives me a brief lesson on the epidemology and contagiousness of shingles, as well as divulging the unncessary fact that the shingle scabs at issue are on his lower back; a factotum that I wished he had not deigned to confide in me. The gist of G's email is that while he is taking sufficient amount of painkillers so as to put him in vicodin-induced haze, he is ready, willing, and able to come to work; indeed, he can come in later today if need be.

For a second, I sit back and contemplate G's request. Here is a guy who has just been diagnosed with an infectious disease that, from I read on wikipedia, causes extraordinary pain and discomfort and can last up to several months. Nevertheless, rather than sacrifice a day of sitting in front of a computer earning $32 an hour reading a financial company's internal emails, he would rather come in and work, (and not incidentally, put everyone else at risk of catching his disease). I admire the guy's fortitude, but at the same time, I am reminded, as I often am in the depressing industry of law, of the lengths to which my fellow members of the bar will go to make a buck. In addition, I am reminded of the vicissitudes of life as a short-term attorney where as an unprotected employee, you are not entitled to sick days, health insurance, or the ability to work from home. For my people, a simple illness like shingles can be a disaster.

Meanwhile, my team members have been busy scouring the Internet for information on shingles. We learn that while its generally not a contagious disease, it can be dangerous to those who have not had the chicken pox. Of course, two members of my team, the most hysterical and menopausal members of the team, have never gotten the chicken pox. I try to alleviate their concerns and stress that it's not fair to keep G out of work as the guy has to make a living too. I forward G's email to D with the added info that B and S have never had chicken pox. An hour later, D sends me a terse email stating that G can come in whenever he is healthy. I inform the team of HR's decision and they don't seem happy about it but no one says anything. Later, as it often her modus operandi, J, the 60-ish post-menopausal red-head with the dwarf for a son, expresses some whining concern that she's afraid of getting chicken pox. I tell her that, from what I know about the chicken pox, she would have to rub up against G's sores in order to contract the disease. "you're not a doctor", she replies. She's right, I think to myself, I'm not a doctor. If I was a doctor, I wouldn't be sitting in this room with you and 18 other outcasts of the legal world left to code documents making shit money as team leader of a ragtag group of underpaid coders. I wouldn't have the indignity of knowing that my employers, law firm partners with mansions in Scarsdale and summer houses in Florida, were getting rich charging $300 an hour for my time, while paying me $40/hour. But I don't say this. I just keep quiet and go back to surfing the net...

The day passes in relative quiet. I get an email from G saying that although he's barely able to stand, he's planning on coming in tomorrow. At 7:55, I snap at J, reminding her that she has to leave at 8 pm. All the coders are supposed to leave at 8, but J, usually tries to stretch out the time; all the better to get that extra $5 for an extra shot for her dwarf son. I go home. Eating dinner in front of the TV, I find myself thinking about G in his shitty apartment in Washington Heights, dazed from his pain medicatins, perhaps sitting in front of his TV too eating dinner in his tighty-whities. I try not to think about tomorrow and the stress it will bring. Sleep comes and with it, comfortable oblivion.

For some reason, my alarm does not work the next day and I wake up late. I show up at work and J, in his nervous and incredibly needy way smiles and me and says "uh, hey. hi. There you are." J's got a pregnant (and very obnoxious, it appears) wife and when he told her that one of his colleagues had shingles, she promptly threw a shit-fit. He expresses his concern about G in his polite, obsequious way. Another coder, S, a somewhat shaky fellow whose hands tremble when he talks, expresses his concern that he might be suspectible to illness because the medication he takes compromises his immune system. When I tell S that it's really not up to me whether G comes in and besides, he's already had chicken pox so has nothing at all to worry about and that he probably has a better chance of getting sick on the subway coming to work than getting sick at work, he gets a little testy. This is surprising since S is a beta male who, from what I can gather, is on some rather strong medication that is probably related to the ways his hands shake. S's mother is sick and he has to visit her everyday in the hospital which is why he leaves work everyday at 4 pm. He is smarter and older than the average coder and so I assume that he must be deeply resentful of his current station in life, an end result that I imagine is connected and perhaps a causal factor to his shaking hands.

Other voices spring up. The general consensus is that the group does not want G to come back. I try to seem professional and tell the team that their concerns are valid, but the chances of getting ill are slim, and that, in any event, the decision is not up to me and I will pass on their concerns to D. I dash off an email to D that relays the teams concerns in as neutral manner as possible, hoping that I can somehow place the decision on their shoulders without making it look like I am shirking my duties. A couple hours later,I have emails from G saying that he is not coming in today until 3 and from D telling me to advise G not to come in until he is not contagious. I relay this to G. G responds with a lengthy exposition on the exact definition of contagious. According to G, he has not been told by a doctor that he is not contagious, and therefore, there still exists the possibility of being contagious, his doctor told him that he could come in to work. In other words, while he is not not contagious, he doesn't think he is contagious enough for there to be concern.

I tell him that he needs to get a doctor's note saying he is not contagious. G responds that he has to pay $70 to get another consulation (no health insurance, isn't American great?) but he will do so. I forward this to D and she replies tersely that she is in a meeting. In other words, she doesn't want to deal with it. Eventually, G accepts that he has to get a doctor's note and that he has to fax it to HR before he can come in. The situation seems to have stabilized.

The day goes by. I surf the net and I reflect on what has transpired. It's a seemingly small event in an otherwise uneventful day, yet it touches on so much of what makes our current reality so bewildering and unncessarily fucking complicated. The temporary employee with no health care getting sick, the corporate law firm who is out to maintain the profits of its partners at all costs - and doesn't have any qualms about exploiting lawyers to do so, the near-hysterical anxiety and tenseness that affects workers, particularly non-unionized "professionals" in an economic system that treats them like disposable parts, and me, caught in the middle, as usual. or more precisely caught on the wrong "side" in a war withot end -trying to get by in a system that seems designed to keep us in that state of continuous fear that we might lose our jobs, lose our health insurance, and then inevtiably lose our sense of reality in a world where you are truly on your own, where there is no one looking out for you, where you have to find your little piece of reality, call it your own, and try to defend from the greater forces in the universe tearing us to bits.

Postscript: G paid the $70 and got the note from his doctor. He then dutiful faxed the note to D and got the following response. "Thanks for sending in the note! We will review and then advise you of the firm's decision. Hope you feel better." Needless to say, G was dismayed to learn that the firm had yet to make a decision as it appeared that, in fact, a decision had been made.

As for myself, I don't think I have the shingles, but I do have an itch on my back that's been bothering me.....it could be the chicken pox, but it's probably just a blood-borne parasite that will likely ravage my skin and my immune system.