week in review
Oct. 24th, 2004 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fearlesstempFirst, an announcement: It is I, scoutmol, now fearlesstemp. Am unsure about the name but could not think of anything else. Also, I did the no-redirect thing because of work concerns. Which makes me feel bad because I was so grateful for the redirect thing when other people changed their LJ names. Am callous bitch! My apologies, though!
Second, this entry is so GD long and boring. Must break out the cut tags.
Monday
Last month, the office manager at the law firm where I'm temping came up to my desk while I was mid-e-mail check and said, "A is going on vacation for a week in October – do you think you could help out a bit with T's work?"
"Sure," I said, smiling at her while blindly hitting the Window+D command to minimize all windows. "Of course! Anything I can do!"
LITTLE DID I KNOW.
This week at work was insane and brutal. I had to do my regular (relatively non-brutal) reception duties and also cover all of A's work for T, the most senior partner of the firm. I spent all of this week frantically running from one end of the office to the other, trying to do both jobs at once and succeeding at neither.
Monday was my first day of doing this. An hour into it I heard someone buzz T and call him "Sir"– I've been buzzing him by his first name for the past two months. Awesome! I decided that the "sir" thing must have been a joke because thinking otherwise would just...not be good on many levels.
By my lunch hour I was all stressed and furious at the world in general and T in particular (who, it turns out, is so the type of person to wait until 11:50AM to give revisions on a document you handed him three hours earlier and expect you to finish it up before you leave for lunch. I hate that type of person.). I stormed across town, leaving a whiny voicemail for Kaelie, and stumbled into my new favorite lunch place all scattered and frantic, juggling the cell phone, a binder full of paperwork for my school applications, and my purse. To top it all off, the counter guy told me they were out of Pasta Fagiole, which I had been looking forward to all day.
I almost cried. Instead I ordered a Primo Salad with chicken.
While I was waiting for the salad, I started examining the restaurant for possible tables when this woman started grinning and waving happily in my direction. I smiled in a vague way and – yes, I actually did this – turned around to look at the guy making my salad, convinced she was waving at him.
And then the woman got up, and started walking towards me. Terrifying. I have the worst memory for faces. I remember NO ONE and since I went to school in three local counties, have a huge Irish Catholic family, and have been temping all over the place the last two years, this is a major problem. I've kind of perfected the vague, "Hiiii! How ARE youuu?" for people I don't immediately recognize (the key is to drag out every word for as long as possible, giving yourself more time to remember who the person is).
The lucky thing on Monday was that when the woman got within five feet of me, I recognized her – Meredith, who I went to school with until I was thirteen and haven't seen since, I think. She, a girl named Rebecca, and I were the smartest people in our elementary and middle schools, always jostling for the top spot on the honor roll. When I left the school district to go to a Catholic high school, Meredith's mother actually came up to my parents and said, "Well, now one of you is gone. Now it's just Rebecca."
Meredith and Rebecca went to some super-prestigious colleges for science, and I had figured each of them was heading up some kind of important research program or something. I stood there with my cheap plastic binder and ugly brown shoes and felt utterly inadequate, but still asked the brave question about what she's up to, prepared to hear about her exciting life.
"My boyfriend runs a restaurant in New Orleans and I work there," she said when I asked her what she was up to. "I don't use my degree at all."
"Oh my God, I don't use my degree EITHER!" I exclaimed. "At all! I'm a temp!"
"Mine was so expensive!" she said. "I feel so guilty!"
"ME TOO!"
And then we exchanged e-mail addresses and talked about how lame our jobs are. It was awesome! Except in the flurry of talking, I forgot to tell the counter guy that my lunch wasn't to go, and so I got my lunch in a bag and Meredith assumed I was leaving for somewhere else, and I just went along because the conversation between us had kind of un out (also, she was sitting with her father and some other older guy anyway). I ended up back out on the street, lunch in hand, no idea what to do. It was 48 degrees but I sat in the courtyard across from my building instead of eating it in the lunch room with my coworkers. That is how anti-social I am.
Tuesday
Tuesday I was home sick. I felt super-guilty because I was supposed to be pulling double duty at work and didn't show up at all. But then I got to sleep for hours and hours an watched a Totally Awesome Move, Random Harvest. Here is the movie summary:
Seven Oscar nominations went to this James Hilton best-seller depicting the romance between a war victim of amnesia (Ronald Colman) and the vivacious showgirl (Greer Garson) who nurtures him back to health. Their love, and three blissful years of marriage, are erased from Colman's mind when an accident reverses his amnesia and returns him to his former life as a wealthy industrialist. Garson, already well on her way to becoming MGM's queen of bravery and self-sacrifice, tracks him down, becomes his secretary, and suffers through his platonic feelings for her and his love for another woman, Susan Peters. The film's extraordinary climax, and the many surprises that lead to it, create a memorable and satisfying tale.
A war victim of amnesia! A vivacious showgirl! A wealthy industrialist! The movie is just as awesome as it sounds. At the beginning, Mr. Amnesia also has a random speech problem, which apparently just causes him to speak like William Shatner. And then he gets his (original) memory back and has this creepy, inappropriate romance with his niece by marriage. And then Greer has to be his SECRETARY! It was so tragic! He didn't REMEMBER HER! And he was going through the motions of his life but not REALLY HAPPY* because he needed HER!
*I kind of projected that, since Mr. Colman wasn't so great at the simmering dissatisfaction. He actually seemed pretty happy in his wealthy industrialist life, but I pretended he was miserable.
Wednesday
Wednesday I went back to work and continued to want to throw Mr. Senior Partner out the window. I'll leave it at that.
After work, I had to go to my literacy volunteers training, where I was assigned my student. The trainer handed out the sheets and told us that she would need to speak to some of us about our assignments.
She handed me my student's information sheet and stopped next to my chair. "Your student is a special case. He's had his job twenty-eight years and if he doesn't learn to read, he's going to lose his job. Good luck!"
No pressure, right?
I've already called him twice but he hasn't called me back. I'm already all stressed out. As I told my family, if I'm all that's standing between this man and the bread line, GOD HELP HIM.
Thursday
Thursday was pretty uneventful. I had my weekly lunch with the cool coworker from the Evil Republican Law Firm and then ran into Mr. Nice Boss and Mr. OCD Boss from said ERLF on the street. Had an awkward three-minute conversation with them and then ran away. God, I so dislike Mr. OCD Boss.
Also, I got my hair cut and watched some of my Arrested Development DVDs. Fab show!
Friday
Friday afternoon I left a voicemail for Joanna in which I said that I was having the worst work day of the worst work week of my life. This was likely an exaggeration, because I know my time at Evil Acronym Company was chock full of work days and weeks that killed my soul. But this was probably one of the worst outside of that experience.
I had spent most of Thursday putting together this huge motion for Mr. Boss Partner, which involved, I don't know, six or eight related documents that ranged from two pages to thirty pages each. And about a hundred pages of exhibits (not exaggerating). After a day full of ridiculous revisions (changing the same sentence three times only to end up with the original construction, for example), I finally printed them on the special red-lined paper and got Mr. Boss Partner to sign them, at which point he told me to start making copies.
And so I, crazy girl that I am, did just that! Only to come in on Friday morning to discover that he had decided to revise two of the longer documents. Which meant I had to throw everything out (except the exhibits, thank God), because the documents all referred to each other by date (a document that referred to "the Notice of Petition dated October 21, 2004" had to be tossed when the Notice of Petition was now dated October 22, 2004, for example). The pagination on the Memorandum of Law got messed up too, which meant I had to go through and manually change ALL of the references to cases and statutes on the Table of Authorities.
Isn't this riveting? I don't care. It was so infuriating and annoying and stressful (they had to file the stupid thing that afternoon, and halfway through Mr. Boss Partner gave me these two liens to do because a client was coming in to sign them and I had to do that too) that I can't bear not sharing every last detail.
It totally would have imploded in disaster if another secretary hadn't abandoned her work to help me bind the stupid thing. I'm positive I'll come into work on Monday and discover that everything I did was wrong. Can't wait!!
Saturday
I slept all of Saturday morning and spent Saturday afternoon handing out material for the local Democratic party. It was a beautiful day (I'm not sure there's anything more beautiful than the Northeast in October). My mother and I walked all over creation and today we've been having the following conversation over and over –
Me: My CALVES!
Mom: My FEET!
Me: CALVES!
Mom: FEET!
Jimmy: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SHUT UP!
Dad: Yeah, I can't hear the game.
My brother came home for the weekend, and over dinner he told us about his roommate, whose girlfriend just dumped him. He was so devastated by the breakup that he walked to the hospital and then had to call my brother to pick him up. My brother spent last weekend sitting in the emergency room next to his roommate, who couldn't stop crying. My brother, who's this big hulking silent type, who would rather die than have someone see him cry.
"There are all these people bleeding out their eyes, with broken arms and legs and I'm there with this blubbering idiot," my brother said.
"Last weekend he just sat in the apartment watching football and crying," Jimmy said. "Holding a teddy bear she gave him."
It took me a good few minutes to stop laughing long enough to ask, "What did you do? Did you say anything?"
"No," my brother said, as if I'd just asked him if he was going to eat roadkill. "What am I going to do? Hug him?"
Sunday
There's no food in the house, so I had popcorn for breakfast with Diet Pepsi to wash it down. I watched football all afternoon, 60 Minutes and American Dreams after that, and now the World Series. Have I mentioned that October is the best month ever?
Second, this entry is so GD long and boring. Must break out the cut tags.
Monday
Last month, the office manager at the law firm where I'm temping came up to my desk while I was mid-e-mail check and said, "A is going on vacation for a week in October – do you think you could help out a bit with T's work?"
"Sure," I said, smiling at her while blindly hitting the Window+D command to minimize all windows. "Of course! Anything I can do!"
LITTLE DID I KNOW.
This week at work was insane and brutal. I had to do my regular (relatively non-brutal) reception duties and also cover all of A's work for T, the most senior partner of the firm. I spent all of this week frantically running from one end of the office to the other, trying to do both jobs at once and succeeding at neither.
Monday was my first day of doing this. An hour into it I heard someone buzz T and call him "Sir"– I've been buzzing him by his first name for the past two months. Awesome! I decided that the "sir" thing must have been a joke because thinking otherwise would just...not be good on many levels.
By my lunch hour I was all stressed and furious at the world in general and T in particular (who, it turns out, is so the type of person to wait until 11:50AM to give revisions on a document you handed him three hours earlier and expect you to finish it up before you leave for lunch. I hate that type of person.). I stormed across town, leaving a whiny voicemail for Kaelie, and stumbled into my new favorite lunch place all scattered and frantic, juggling the cell phone, a binder full of paperwork for my school applications, and my purse. To top it all off, the counter guy told me they were out of Pasta Fagiole, which I had been looking forward to all day.
I almost cried. Instead I ordered a Primo Salad with chicken.
While I was waiting for the salad, I started examining the restaurant for possible tables when this woman started grinning and waving happily in my direction. I smiled in a vague way and – yes, I actually did this – turned around to look at the guy making my salad, convinced she was waving at him.
And then the woman got up, and started walking towards me. Terrifying. I have the worst memory for faces. I remember NO ONE and since I went to school in three local counties, have a huge Irish Catholic family, and have been temping all over the place the last two years, this is a major problem. I've kind of perfected the vague, "Hiiii! How ARE youuu?" for people I don't immediately recognize (the key is to drag out every word for as long as possible, giving yourself more time to remember who the person is).
The lucky thing on Monday was that when the woman got within five feet of me, I recognized her – Meredith, who I went to school with until I was thirteen and haven't seen since, I think. She, a girl named Rebecca, and I were the smartest people in our elementary and middle schools, always jostling for the top spot on the honor roll. When I left the school district to go to a Catholic high school, Meredith's mother actually came up to my parents and said, "Well, now one of you is gone. Now it's just Rebecca."
Meredith and Rebecca went to some super-prestigious colleges for science, and I had figured each of them was heading up some kind of important research program or something. I stood there with my cheap plastic binder and ugly brown shoes and felt utterly inadequate, but still asked the brave question about what she's up to, prepared to hear about her exciting life.
"My boyfriend runs a restaurant in New Orleans and I work there," she said when I asked her what she was up to. "I don't use my degree at all."
"Oh my God, I don't use my degree EITHER!" I exclaimed. "At all! I'm a temp!"
"Mine was so expensive!" she said. "I feel so guilty!"
"ME TOO!"
And then we exchanged e-mail addresses and talked about how lame our jobs are. It was awesome! Except in the flurry of talking, I forgot to tell the counter guy that my lunch wasn't to go, and so I got my lunch in a bag and Meredith assumed I was leaving for somewhere else, and I just went along because the conversation between us had kind of un out (also, she was sitting with her father and some other older guy anyway). I ended up back out on the street, lunch in hand, no idea what to do. It was 48 degrees but I sat in the courtyard across from my building instead of eating it in the lunch room with my coworkers. That is how anti-social I am.
Tuesday
Tuesday I was home sick. I felt super-guilty because I was supposed to be pulling double duty at work and didn't show up at all. But then I got to sleep for hours and hours an watched a Totally Awesome Move, Random Harvest. Here is the movie summary:
Seven Oscar nominations went to this James Hilton best-seller depicting the romance between a war victim of amnesia (Ronald Colman) and the vivacious showgirl (Greer Garson) who nurtures him back to health. Their love, and three blissful years of marriage, are erased from Colman's mind when an accident reverses his amnesia and returns him to his former life as a wealthy industrialist. Garson, already well on her way to becoming MGM's queen of bravery and self-sacrifice, tracks him down, becomes his secretary, and suffers through his platonic feelings for her and his love for another woman, Susan Peters. The film's extraordinary climax, and the many surprises that lead to it, create a memorable and satisfying tale.
A war victim of amnesia! A vivacious showgirl! A wealthy industrialist! The movie is just as awesome as it sounds. At the beginning, Mr. Amnesia also has a random speech problem, which apparently just causes him to speak like William Shatner. And then he gets his (original) memory back and has this creepy, inappropriate romance with his niece by marriage. And then Greer has to be his SECRETARY! It was so tragic! He didn't REMEMBER HER! And he was going through the motions of his life but not REALLY HAPPY* because he needed HER!
*I kind of projected that, since Mr. Colman wasn't so great at the simmering dissatisfaction. He actually seemed pretty happy in his wealthy industrialist life, but I pretended he was miserable.
Wednesday
Wednesday I went back to work and continued to want to throw Mr. Senior Partner out the window. I'll leave it at that.
After work, I had to go to my literacy volunteers training, where I was assigned my student. The trainer handed out the sheets and told us that she would need to speak to some of us about our assignments.
She handed me my student's information sheet and stopped next to my chair. "Your student is a special case. He's had his job twenty-eight years and if he doesn't learn to read, he's going to lose his job. Good luck!"
No pressure, right?
I've already called him twice but he hasn't called me back. I'm already all stressed out. As I told my family, if I'm all that's standing between this man and the bread line, GOD HELP HIM.
Thursday
Thursday was pretty uneventful. I had my weekly lunch with the cool coworker from the Evil Republican Law Firm and then ran into Mr. Nice Boss and Mr. OCD Boss from said ERLF on the street. Had an awkward three-minute conversation with them and then ran away. God, I so dislike Mr. OCD Boss.
Also, I got my hair cut and watched some of my Arrested Development DVDs. Fab show!
Friday
Friday afternoon I left a voicemail for Joanna in which I said that I was having the worst work day of the worst work week of my life. This was likely an exaggeration, because I know my time at Evil Acronym Company was chock full of work days and weeks that killed my soul. But this was probably one of the worst outside of that experience.
I had spent most of Thursday putting together this huge motion for Mr. Boss Partner, which involved, I don't know, six or eight related documents that ranged from two pages to thirty pages each. And about a hundred pages of exhibits (not exaggerating). After a day full of ridiculous revisions (changing the same sentence three times only to end up with the original construction, for example), I finally printed them on the special red-lined paper and got Mr. Boss Partner to sign them, at which point he told me to start making copies.
And so I, crazy girl that I am, did just that! Only to come in on Friday morning to discover that he had decided to revise two of the longer documents. Which meant I had to throw everything out (except the exhibits, thank God), because the documents all referred to each other by date (a document that referred to "the Notice of Petition dated October 21, 2004" had to be tossed when the Notice of Petition was now dated October 22, 2004, for example). The pagination on the Memorandum of Law got messed up too, which meant I had to go through and manually change ALL of the references to cases and statutes on the Table of Authorities.
Isn't this riveting? I don't care. It was so infuriating and annoying and stressful (they had to file the stupid thing that afternoon, and halfway through Mr. Boss Partner gave me these two liens to do because a client was coming in to sign them and I had to do that too) that I can't bear not sharing every last detail.
It totally would have imploded in disaster if another secretary hadn't abandoned her work to help me bind the stupid thing. I'm positive I'll come into work on Monday and discover that everything I did was wrong. Can't wait!!
Saturday
I slept all of Saturday morning and spent Saturday afternoon handing out material for the local Democratic party. It was a beautiful day (I'm not sure there's anything more beautiful than the Northeast in October). My mother and I walked all over creation and today we've been having the following conversation over and over –
Me: My CALVES!
Mom: My FEET!
Me: CALVES!
Mom: FEET!
Jimmy: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SHUT UP!
Dad: Yeah, I can't hear the game.
My brother came home for the weekend, and over dinner he told us about his roommate, whose girlfriend just dumped him. He was so devastated by the breakup that he walked to the hospital and then had to call my brother to pick him up. My brother spent last weekend sitting in the emergency room next to his roommate, who couldn't stop crying. My brother, who's this big hulking silent type, who would rather die than have someone see him cry.
"There are all these people bleeding out their eyes, with broken arms and legs and I'm there with this blubbering idiot," my brother said.
"Last weekend he just sat in the apartment watching football and crying," Jimmy said. "Holding a teddy bear she gave him."
It took me a good few minutes to stop laughing long enough to ask, "What did you do? Did you say anything?"
"No," my brother said, as if I'd just asked him if he was going to eat roadkill. "What am I going to do? Hug him?"
Sunday
There's no food in the house, so I had popcorn for breakfast with Diet Pepsi to wash it down. I watched football all afternoon, 60 Minutes and American Dreams after that, and now the World Series. Have I mentioned that October is the best month ever?
