I have a lawyer acquaintance downtown. . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

but actually, he’s not an acquaintance; he’s my boss for a few more days. I got a call from Kelly Services Tuesday for a last minute assignment (I guess you get points of some sort for taking these).

It’s my second temporary job. His office help left without notice, and in the week previous to this one, he went through five temps in as many days. The first day I was there, he told me I was better than all the others, but I had my doubts. He was highly critical, and I was thinking those other temps ran screaming.

The second day, I had my own key and plastic card for the parking ramp. I got there at least a half-hour before he did. As I unlocked the door, I heard this high pitched beep, and wondered if someone had left a computer on. Thirty seconds later the sirens started. The phone rang and I answered “________'s Law Office, this is Laura.
How may I help you?”

It was the alarm company. I told them I was not even told about the alarm. And of course, they weren’t allowed to tell me how to turn it off. So I left a note on his desk, locked up the office, and walked across the street to Kelly Services to wait (they called and left a message with his answering service).

He got in to work, called and apologized, and my second day there started. He left to deliver aome papers to an appeals court in the Twin Cities (the ones we had worked on the day before), so I got as far as I could on two or three projects, made coffee, vacuumed, straightened my desk as far as I could without putting away something that might have been important, and was typing the Gettysburg address when he walked in.

I had several questions to ask him, and he asked me “Why are you working on all these things at once? I told you to finish one thing, and then go on to the next.”

I told him the problem was, I didn’t have enough information to finish them correctly, and since I had already exhausted everything else I could think of to do, it was better than sitting there twiddling my thumbs on the time he was paying for. He actually liked that answer.

So for the last two days he has alternately been telling me how I should do things instead of the way I do things, and telling me my artistic personality makes me scatterbrained and I need to compartmentalize more, and then trying to talk me in to working permanently there as a part-time office assistant.

I told him that I need full-time, and that I think we would probably kill each other before a year elapsed. He doesn’t think he would kill me, but I know I would kill him. And he is one of the best in town (according to him, he wins most of his cases) so who would defend me?

Yesterday someone called for an interview and I told him I hoped he would hire her. He asked if I would stay on and overlap her for a while. I told him “Sure. With two of us, she could pin you to the floor while I jump up and down on you.” He thought that was quite funny.

But I have to say, I think lawyers earn every penny of the money they make.

2

Geez, I thought this was going to be a Good-Bye Girl thread.

And don’t Temp jobs just suck in general? I worked for a year at a temp job where my main duties were running out for cookies and not getting caught surfing the SDMB.

Good luck in your future endeavors and all that.

3

Thanks for your good wishes, Jack Batty!

----:)/ x o x o
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Both of the temp jobs I have held (since starting this in November) have been fairly stressful, because neither were entry level type jobs. But they are both excellent experience, and my bosses all say (I had two bosses at the Office of Graduate Studies at the local university) they will give me good references.

I think that people who are experts at their jobs think in chunks of information (there is a theory about this) and sometimes forget that novices have to gather and remember all the information before they know what they are doing.

I did steal the line from The Good-Bye Girl, but I think Richard Dreyfus’ character stole it from A Streetcar Named Desire.

4

True, but the way you delivered the line was a dead on Dreyfuss impersonation.
:slight_smile:

5

Yeah, temp jobs suck, especially the ones that dangle the hope of full-time employment over your head but never deliver. I had one where they did this, and finally bitched to a co-worker about the fact that they still hadn’t gotten around to bringing me on board as an actually employee. She laughed and said, “Honey, that’s what they tell ALL of the temps. They wait until you start nagging 'em about it, and then say they don’t need you any more, and get a new one. They think it’ll make you work harder if you think you might have a shot at being permenant.”

You might want to say to lawyer-boss that you might stay if he could make it financially worth your while. Figure up how much you’d want a week if you were working full time, and then ask him for that sum for working part-time for him. Negotiate a little. Lawyers LOVE to negotiate! :wink:

It sounds like the two of you have a rapport, and maybe he’d chill out after a while and it would turn out to be a great job.

Good luck!!

6

My hat goes off to anyone who can parachute into a support job in a law firm and live to tell about it.

Usually temps’ synapses start shorting out, leading to a state of total and permanent catatonia. The few that don’t fizzle-up usually use their few remaining grey cells to figure out that they had better quickly chew their leg off at the ankle to escape the manacle holding them to the desk.

That you are still there and still sentient speaks volumes. No wonder your boss wants to keep you. Congratulations, and run like hell while you have the chance.

Seriously, talk to your boss about training to run your boss’s and your own files. If you can start billing for your work without increasing your boss’s work, you can make a pile of money for both you and your boss. This why my part-time temp since last fall is going over to full-time permanent next week.

Even if you end up murdering your boss after a year, you’ll have developed a skill set so valuable that you’ll have any number of lawyers lined up to first defend you and then hire you. Just remember, it all comes down to being able to cleanly and efficiently run files with minimal supervision. The more billable hours you generate on your own without messing up, the more valuable you are. Before you know it, you’ll have your own temp working the phones for you.

7

Gotta love that logic Spidey, you just may get the job yet!

8

. . .and the good wishes. And the advice about learning to run lawyers’ files is good too. I will stay as long as he keeps asking me to come back the next day.

Zenster, I think he is pretty serious about hiring that person he interviewed, but he didn’t hire her on the spot so there may be something else in his beady little brain (an expression stolen from my ex-husband). If I end up working there, will you bake something lovely concealing a file when I am languishing in prison?

I did find out later in the week that those other temps didn’t return because he called and asked for someone different each day (reminiscent of Bluebeard, methinks), not because they didn’t want to come back.

Did I mention the walls are prison grey? I actually asked him why, and he said the decorating outfit gave him the professional look. What profession, I wonder?

-----:rolleyes:
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I am probably a little more cheeky than I actually should be to a boss, the feeling of being a temp gives me this heady sense of freedom after working in a factory (which also had prison gray walls) for twenty-five years.

9

Never turn down a job. Just ask for the amount of money that would really make you take that job. Sometimes, they say yes. If so, when you’re putting up with his shit, you can console yourself by thinking of how much he’s paying you.

10

The deal here is that I am still eligible for TRA (which is an extension of unemployment through NAFTA because my job got sent to Indonesia). If I can’t find work, I can fall back on that as long as I make five shows of diligence each week I claim. Since I completed office training in early November, I have only claimed one full week and one partial week. If I take a permanent part-time job (he wants to hire two part-time people rather than one full-time person: a four hour a day and a five hour a day person), it needs to pay enough to cover my bills or at least be more than I am making on TRA.

If he had offered me full-time employment, I would probably have accepted. I have actually come to like the guy, and realize he is under a lot of pressure to meet deadlines and continue his practice with untrained office help. Hopefully the job wouldn’t be as stressful for me once I knew what I was doing.

11 
  Hey, if you were here, just get me on the jury. I'd label just about any killing of a lawyer as justifiable homicide. :D

Yes, I do have lawyers in the family. Just not as many as I once did. Jury tampering, bribery, tax evasion, disbarment. You know, lawyer stuff.
12

“I have a lawyer acquaintance who will study these out.” - Stanley Kowalski

13

I knew from your sig that you would know the correct quote. And Jack Batty knew them both too.

And Happy New Year to you!

And Happy New Year to all the SDMB members and mods and lurkers!

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----:)/ x o x o x
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14

I went back to the lawyer’s office on January 2nd, and he had brought his daughter, who was visiting from the Twin Cities for the holidays, and was between jobs, to do the job I was doing. She had worked for him many summers during high school, so I can see where that would work well for them. They would have paid me till noon, because this was sprung on me rather unexpectedly, but there was nothing for me to do but get in the way (she answered all the incoming calls before I had a chance, and seemed very professional), so I left. I did make an appointment with the lawyer, which will be tonight, for him to review the terms of imthjckaz’s divorce decree.

My next assignment was at a big investment company here in town. The temp service called me about it yesterday at 9:20 AM and I was in their door by ten. The job consisted of checking internet print-outs for buys and sells in mutual funds, and making sure there was an account #, that the symbol on the print-out matched the symbol on the screen, etc., and then sorting them. I was a little panicky at first (happens to me the first day or so of a job) but felt fairly comfortable with it by 4:30, quit time. The job was supposed to last until March.

This morning I walked to the job, probably a mile and a half from my house. Good exercise, avoids parking problems. The supervisor, when she came in, asked me to call the temp service. I asked her why, and she pleaded ignorance.

Well, she had called them and asked them not to send me again, and to send someone else. I walked to the temp service to turn in my time card, and they said the woman had said the job was too fast-paced for me (not true).

Later, after I returned home, I got a message while I was doing laundry in the basement to call the temp service. The reason the investment company let me go is because I had discussed salary with the woman who trained me in, a rather foolish breach of office etiquette on my part. Had I been one of their own employees, they would have fired me on the spot.

In my defense, the woman who trained me told me she was a transplant from the Cities. When I asked her how she liked St. Cloud, she mentioned the low pay rate, which I said was sort of an exchange for the lower cost of living, and the conversation proceeded from there; it’s not like I asked her out of the blue what the pay rate was (my eventual question had been to ask what an entry level position paid). Apparently someone in another cubicle overheard this, or the woman herself reported the conversation to the supervisor.

At the factory where I worked for 25 years, everyone knew how much everyone else was making, and it was no big deal. I guess in other places it is, and even though I am somewhat naive to office etiquette, I guess I should have figured it out.

I apologized to the woman at the temp service, and explained how it had happened, and that it wouldn’t happen again.

On the plus side, I learned a lesson, and if I had to lose a temp job over it, I’m glad it was this one. I am not at all interested in that field, and I didn’t like the number and size of the cubicles crammed into the space where I was working. But I still feel sad and pretty stupid.

-----:frowning:
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15

Ouchies Spidey. Yup, major no-no. Here in Silicon Valley, the temps sometimes make much more than the regulars, due to emergency hiring and worker shortages.

I’m glad it wasn’t a job that you liked.

16

I think that was the case here, also, that the temps get paid more than the regulars. Ordinarily it’s not something I would even have thought of discussing, but I am too open with people and need to be more careful and guarded. I don’t think she was fishing for information, but whatever the scenario, it’s over, and hopefully I’ll stop feeling bad pretty soon. I’m pretty embarrassed.

17

I’ve been a temp for six years now (kind of a contradiction in terms, I know), and there are quite a few unwritten rules about the biz. If you would like any more tips from a battle-scarred veteran, please feel free to e-mail me.

(ps - please don’t feel embarrassed; sure, that was a no-no, but they didn’t have to can you instantly. It sounds like a pretty tight-assed, regimented environment there. Consider it a compliment that they don’t consider you drone material :slight_smile:

18

I will much appreciate your suggestions. I, too, intend to be a temp for a while, so that I don’t get stuck in a job I absolutely hate. I am hoping to be able to scope out quite a few of the businesses around here and find one I would like. I have been told non-profits are nicer to work for, but they may not hire temps as often.

The temp agency was a little bit stern about the call telling me how I screwed up, so I called them back, after thinking about how this had transpired, and told them that it was in the course of a conversation, and that the other person had brought up the subject of pay first. I also told them that I looked all the way through their pamphlet they gave me, and nothing was said in their about not discussing salary. It may seem, to some people, that everyone should know this, but I didn’t. The person who was snippy to me then said “Well, let’s just put this behind us.” I said “Okay, but I also want others to profit from my mistake. When you put new people through orientation, tell them about this so it won’t happen to someone else, especially people who haven’t worked very much in an office environment.”

I think I will work for the other temp agencies I am signed up for, and give this one a rest for a while.

19

Spider Woman - Good luck to ya! Temping sounds like a neat way to shop for a job. My brother spent the last year kinda-sorta doing the same thing, but he called it consulting (he’s a CPA/former CFO) and he wasn’t extremely diligent about it until the savings account started getting lean. He just accepted a temp-might-become-permanent-position so both he and the company can decide if they like each other over the next few months. Not sure what my point is, but I wanted to offer you some good vibes and happy thoughts! :smiley:

20

oops, it should say 'nothing was said in their pamphlet about. . . ", not “nothing was said in their about. . .”

----:o/
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And thanks, FairyChatMom! I am feeling much better today.