Online since June 1997!

You Had to Be There #2

14-Oct-02 -- 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.