Online since June 1997!

You Had to Be There #1

14-Oct-02 -- In 1988 before moving to NYC from California, my brother-in-law was helping me move a bunch of old furniture and belongings that I wasn't going to schlep across the country to a charitable organization.

We had worked tirelessly all day and needed to make several trips because the truck could only hold so much and there was so much to get rid of.  He was doing this as a favor to me, so it was understandable that we would pack as much stuff as possible into the truck for each load to the other side of town.  He was always a prankster and still makes me laugh to this day, but this time he made me laugh so hard I cried.  In our anguish to get done, we had about two or three crappy little items that just wouldn't fit in the last load of the truck.  We tried to jimmy it every which way, but it was a no go.  So Tony took the two or three ugliest pieces of furniture he could find and put them on my lawn.  He took out a marker and pen and wrote in juvenile handwriting "For Sale - Really Cheap" and then put on a fake phone number!  Of course no one was even going to be out there watching this crap, so that is partly why I am still laughing about it to this day.  I wonder how many pitiful days that crappy table and chairs which were probably too hazardous to even use sat out there in that beautiful neighborhood waiting for someone to "buy" them!  Just the fact that Tony would be so clever as to have a "ghost-sale" makes me crack up.

When I was in law school I was working for a law firm.  Among the people who worked there was a lawyer who had a secretary, my friend Sylvia.  Sylvia thought this male lawyer was sleeping with one of the female paralegals.  Sylvia was a very competent secretary and she was very happy to be able to challenge herself mentally with a lot of the things that she did for this very busy attorney's practice.  However, when this paralegal, who Sylvia always complained as being a spoiled brat, needed applications for law school prepared, rather than do it herself, the way *I* did it, Sylvia was asked by the attorney she worked for to prepare these extensive applications herself.  Meanwhile, the paralegal who had only been there a short time had RAVE reviews by the attorneys, particularly the one that was probably sleeping with her (he has since divorced). 

Sylvia avoided preparing these law school applications like the plague.  She made them her lowest priority and could not stand the way the paralegal would treat her like she was her own personal secretary.  In this day and age, paralegals should know how to prepare their own documents, especially on the computer.  Finally it became evident that Sylvia could not avoid this project any more as she was specifically requested to prepare these documents by the attorney.  The documents, including cover letters, which Sylvia said described this inexperienced paralegal as being the Messiah, made Sylvia particularly ill.  Because of it's length, it fell on to two pages.  As everyone knows, only the last page of a letter is signed.  So what did Sylvia do?

Sylvia put some GLARING errors on the front page after the final "approval" and sign-off, almost guaranteeing that a casual reader would see the grammatical and spelling errors on this, such an important document and presumably causing a reviewer to dismiss the application!  We had to celebrate after these things went out.  What's so funny is that it was full-proof.  No one could blame the secretary for the error since it should have been caught by the attorney, but of course in this situation he was fooled.  Lesson?  Don't rub your affair in your secretary's face and then make her do your bitch's homework.