Working on the Weekend

I hate working on the weekend...but here I am busting my ass on Sunday. I went in-house to avoid this as much as possible. What I found is that the "Cushy In-House Position" is an illusion; a myth. It is like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. Oh, sure, there are a few fuzzy pictures of attorneys going to work at 9:00 and leaving at 5 every day without their laptop and a pile of documents, but there isn't any real physical evidence that they exist in the real world. No one has actually shot one and brought in its carcass as proof.

So, here I am, busting my ass on December 18, 2005 to get as much done as I am able.

But it won't cut off the inevitable. At some point during the coming week, I will get several phone calls regarding things I couldn't complete before leaving town.

While I am on a rant, I may as well state that much of my frustration is not from the legal work that I do. It is the huge amount of non-legal babysitting that I do that is frustrating.

Anyone who works in corporate America - Cube-ville - can tell you that people that know what they are doing and really understand it are rare. There are many people that should not have the jobs that they occupy - either too stupid or too lazy or some combination of the two. Read Dilbert. That guy has made a living poking fun at that very premise. It is funny because it is 90% true and 10% exaggerated.

Consequently, I end up doing more than analyzing issues for legal risk and drafting documents to address such legal risk. I end up wiping asses and noses.

I am going to insert - verbatim - an e-mail I recently received from a "documentation specialist"

The E-mail correspondence read as follows:

"I am trying to do a subordination agreement and I am unable to use all of the companies. So Meghan and I retyped the Subordination Agreement off of Laser Pro and I am going to insert the companies."

This was all of the information they gave me. They never told me which transaction this was. They never told me what was being subordinated, why it was being subordinated nor even which agreement about which they were talking. They never told me what companies were involved, why they wouldn't fit or in what capacity they were involved. I didn't even know who the author was nor who Meghan was.

Yet they wanted an answer right away....to what may have been a word-processing issue. To this day, I still don't know if there may have been some legal component to this request as my inquiry for more information was responded to with the following:

"Per ____, we closed the Subordination agreements, We typed word for word from laser pro."

RECALL: this is a person whose job title is "Documentation Specialist." I stay up at night worrying what the documents she drafts look like.

I keep e-mails like this in a folder called "E-Mail of the Week." I think that I will someday put together a power-point presentation on communication and use these all as examples of how poorly people communicate.

I don't mind getting calls from people, while I am out of the office, regarding issues which they have considered, analyzed and have determined require legal analysis. BUT it pisses me off when some moron that doesn't know how to do their own job calls me up so that I can train them to do what they have been paid to do for the last several years.

These same people do come in at 9:00 and leave at 5:00 every day.

My favorite is when someone calls and leaves me a voicemail message at 4:59 asking me to do some project right away and when I call them back 5 minutes later they are already gone for the day.

I can assure you that the average individual clamoring for the work product that I have been producing over the last week has worked approximately 1/2 of the hours that I have worked this last week. I can also assure you that this average person will not even read what I produce and will not understand how it impacts what they do on a daily basis - other than they need it because somebody told them that they have to have it.

These people are at all levels. One of the worst communicators/violators of this is a vice president with an MBA. I can't, for the life of me, figure out how he manages to dress himself in the morning.

Don't pay too much attention to this, I'm just letting off some steam that resulted from too much work, too little time and the pressure of the holiday season.

Hopefully I will have some time soon, to let off a little creative steam instead of pissing and moaning about dumb and annoying people.