Office Space

It occurred to me that between the various jobs I’ve had as an attorney from 1992 to the present, and the Embassy & fast food jobs mentioned in the earlier blog, there have been some which fall in between.  They were more substantial than the summer office jobs with the Embassy – they were real, I got them myself and not through my parents, and meant to pay my rent and living expenses, not just to earn extra cash.   But they were never intended as permanent positions, merely stop-gaps to pay the bills until real legal employment returned.

 Office Space.  I suppose I should start with this: I like the movie – I even bought it on DVD.  More than any other movie, it truly captures the idiocy of the modern office environment in a deliciously cynical yet humorous way.  Milton and his stapler and constant abuse; the badly named Michael Bolton (“there WAS nothing wrong with [his name] until 10 years ago and that no-talent ass-clown started winning Grammies”); Mike Judge’s inane flair-demanding manager; and Peter’s fantastic attitude (?) which got him management consideration.

 Compare this with “The Office”, (the NBC TV show) which I find about 70% as funny.  Of course Jim is my favorite and I enjoyed seeing him finally hook up with Pam.  Dwight gets on my nerves, which I suppose is the point (!).  But I’ve never had a boss like Michael Scott (Steve Carrell).  Still, they have to endure much of the same corporate stupidity as the Initech people.  I find, though, that filtered through Michael the abuse seems more stupid than callous or cruel – compare to the “Bobs” who find it best to fire people on Fridays to avoid problems. 

 Having said that, none of the offices I ever worked in resembled Initech at all.  I’ve never had a tech job, and even CACI, a government contractor, didn’t really resemble that atmosphere.  Nor, for that matter, did any of my jobs resemble the Scranton, PA, branch of Dunder Mifflin.  Anyhow, on to my OWN office experiences.

 AIDSCAP.  This lasted from August 1994 to December 1994.  I had been laid off in March, when my boss Jerry ran out of money to pay me (no slight on my skills).  In August I walked into Manpower and got this job. This was filling in a position of some person at an office near the Arlington Courthouse.  This “agency” did work under a USAID contract on the topic of AIDS – me and maybe two other guys at the office were the only straight guys there.  After a few days of “ok, come back tomorrow” they told me to keep coming back until they filled the position with a permanent employee.  I didn’t even apply for the position myself.  Most of the job was boring make-work which really didn’t challenge me and barely kept me awake until closing time.  When they filled the position in November, I wasn’t very disappointed to be leaving.  But they did treat me well, and I had a good time working with Mike, the only other straight guy there, who wrote for the City Paper, played guitar, and bought his Volvo for $300.

            I try to learn something from every job, no matter how brief or insignificant, and what I learned from this one was this:  by their own documentation and information, the AIDSCAP project noted that in the US, AIDS is primarily a problem of the homosexual community.  It’s only in the Third World where heterosexuals have any appreciable or substantial risk of the disease. 

 CACI/DOJ.  This was considerably different from the others.  I can’t really count it as a lawyer job, as I was hired as a paralegal, and the work was so mindless and repetitive that anyone with a high school education could do it – a JD was definitely overqualified, much less a bar license.

 In May 1998 Jerry was hired by a firm in Fair Lakes, so his firm closed down, and I was out of a job yet again.  By August 1998 my unemployment benefits were running out, and I still hadn’t found a job.  So I walked into Manpower – again - and told them, “I don’t care what you give me, just give me some office job that will pay the bills.”  So they set me up with this: Manpower, filling a contract with CACI, a government contractor, which was in turn filling a contract with the Dept. of Justice.  The position was paralegal, with some scant and nominal hope that MAYBE the DOJ might hire someone out of this.  Despite applying to DOJ several times, however, I never even got an interview – so much for that. 

             The particular project concerned Winstar, which was a massive collection of 120 lawsuits filed against the US in the Court of Federal Claims by various defunct S&Ls.  This was the tail end of the S&L crisis which was in the public spotlight in the early 80s – featuring John McCain and his ties to Keating.  Because of the vast amount of documentation associated with these cases, covering not only 120 different banks but also various federal agencies – the FDIC, the RTC, the OTS, the FHLBB, etc. – it was imperative that some coherent form of document processing was developed.  CACI managed to find a way to scan in every single page of every single document, and attach a tag which would allow them to be retrieved from a database without having to manually retrieve a hard copy of a document.  Some poor schmucks had to process all these documents and enter them into the database – accurately - which is where we came in.  With so many documents, quality control became the prime concern, so much so that they reduced it to a verb: “to QC”. 

             At first I was stationed at L Street, from September 1998 to March 1999, in the so-called “priv group”.  This group focused on entering certain documents into a special database which covered privileged documents; it still wasn’t substantive review, as the decision to label them privileged was made by someone at DOJ who we never met.  In March 1999 this group was transferred to Rosslyn, to a building literally 3 blocks away from where I lived.  To make matters even more interesting, in June ’99, a Brazilian woman, Leila, transferred there from K Street, and by October 1999 we were dating.   In January 2000 I transferred back to L Street, where I was put to work on a specific case.  In June 2000 I went on my first trip to Rio de Janeiro with Leila, and by November 2000 I finally had a lawyer job again, at a firm in Woodbridge, so I was able to quit this job after 2 years and 3 months.  Funny thing was that even after the 90 day temporary period, I never made the switch from Manpower to CACI, and was paid weekly by Manpower the entire time. 

 Adjunct Legal.  I took this job in April 2000 to supplement the CACI/DOJ money, really to pay for the June 2000 trip to Rio.  This meant working full time at CACI down at L Street, then coming back to Rosslyn – the office was 4 blocks from where I lived (this would have been FAR more convenient if I hadn’t transferred to L Street!) – and doing a document processing job.  In this case I was hired as an attorney and paid an attorney rate.  I had to work from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. for 6 weeks straight, though we had Sundays off and only had to work on Saturday if they specifically told us to come in.  Adjunct Legal was filling a contract with Crowell & Moring, which was involved in some litigation regarding DSL service.  Our job was to scan the client’s email databases (no hard copies of any documents anywhere) to determine whether any incriminating evidence was contained therein.  Unlike CACI, where all the document processing was procedural – you were simply verifying that a given document was correctly scanned in – here it was substantive: we had to read the subject matter of each email and make a judgment call on whether it was irrelevant, relevant, and if relevant whether it was good or bad.  We were allowed to dress casual, listen to CDs on headphones on the computer’s CD players, and they provided unlimited drinks and semi-fancy buffets.   I got along fine with the Crowell & Moring lawyers and they were favorably impressed with my output, efficiency and effectiveness.  Unfortunately, none of that led to any leads with C&M, just a favorable reference should I ever apply for another document processing job with them.

 Now I’ve covered all my non-legal jobs: from high school, through college, after law school, up to the present day.  Moreover, I’ve touched upon various elements of my legal experience in several other blogs.  However, I’m sure I’ll find something to write about in the years to come.