A couple of months ago, I was moved from one team to another within my office. I was extremely ambivalent about the switch from the very beginning for a bunch f reasons, and told the managing partner so, but his response was, “Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.” Basically, I was screwed against my will.
On one hand, the team I was on before had a wonderful manager who always kept the best interests of her subordinates at heart. Yes, we worked our tails off, but I don’t mind that in itself as long as I feel that a) everyone is all in the same boat; b) the manager takes all necessary measures to ensure that her team has what they need to do their work; c) she, herself, is not the cause of unnecessary overtime on my part by doing things like letting urgent work sit on her desk until 4:30 on a Friday because she isn’t organized enough to triage, when she knows damn well if she’d given me the work earlier in the day, it would have been done and out the door by then; and d) she doesn’t have vital discussions about, say, a specific case strategy and then fail to transmit the information before I draft the case, such that I have to do everything over again.
On the down side, my team was responsible for a very large account, the largest in the office, and to be charitable, the account was (and is) a huge pain in the ass. They have unreasonable expectations regarding whether we will be able to fit their people into the visa category they want; they don’t provide us vital pieces of information that they know we will need to determine the appropriate course of action; they constantly change their minds midstream and expect us to redraft documents for free; and even when they have us change our entire approach to a case at the last minute because they forgot to tell us something or change their minds about something, they still expect us to stick to the original (extremely tight) deadlines. It’s enough to give a girl an ulcer.
On my new team…well, where do I start? My boss is a really nice, sweet, soft-spoken person, but that sure as hell doesn’t make her a good manager. Don’t get me wrong; I like her as a person (she’s the one who hired me, after all, although I haven’t been on her team in 3 years until now), but working for her is slowly driving me insane. There were plenty of warning signs upfront: she has the smallest team and the smallest client load of anyone in the office, because she just can’t handle the stress that comes with increased volume. The turnover on her team is alarmingly high. It’s pretty routine to shift people around the office as workloads vary, and several times people who were respected professionals and solid performers on other teams have been moved to her team, and all of the sudden they decide they need to find a new line of work. (The admin on my old team did this; she was wonderful on our team for a year, and then she switched to my current team and within two weeks ran crying out of the office, never to return.) She forgets to transmit vital bits of strategy information that fundamentally affect how I draft the case, or sometimes whether I draft it at all because it may not have a viable chance of success. As for herself: she is a workaholic, but in an insanely anal-retentive way. She takes twice as long to finish even relatively straightforward work, because she rewrites things over and over that were perfectly fine to begin with. The worst part of that is that she does that to my work, too; as a nonlawyer, my work has to be reviewed and signed off by a lawyer, and frequently she will edit things on the second draft that she never touched on the first draft, and that are exactly like what I’ve written on other teams with no edits at all. It’s driving me fucking bonkers. Just because she wants to be at work until 9 p.m. every night doesn’t mean I’m willing not to have a life because she’s anal-retentive and can’t make up her mind!
But last night was the last straw. Last week, I had drafted an Outstanding Researcher petition. This is the first step in the green card process for (in this case) a guy who is doing cutting-edge medical research that will potentially benefit tens of millions of people. Basically, I have to show that he is tops in his field, on an international scale; I do this by including information about the significance of his work in the field at large, as documented by the technical literature (how much he has published and in what tier of international scientific journals), the amount and nature of the times his research has been cited by others, peer recommendations, awards, and pretty much anything else that shows he’s hot stuff and has the potential to make a huge impact on his field.
Needless to say, the writing can get pretty technical and verbose, and as a liberal arts person, it takes significant brain power for me to absorb all this technical information and make some kind of coherent argument for why this guy is special. A typical support letter runs 20 pages or so, but can involve reading, organizing, and incorporating information from hundreds of pages of technical literature. It’s a big job. I like it, because one of my favorite aspects of my own job is the opportunity to learn new and geeky things, but it’s mentally exhausting.
So last week, I finished my initial draft. I’ve done a few of these for various teams around the office (it’s the kind of work that gets shifted around as overflow, because it’s usually not very client-specific and not as time-sensitive as other work), and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, even when I discuss the initial drafts with the researchers in question, who are frankly used to people not understanding a damn thing about what they do. My work is generally edited only minimally by other team leaders, and so far I have a 100% INS approval rate.
Last night as I was getting ready to leave, my boss leaves her marked-up copy of my draft on my desk, and tells me I’m basically going to have to rework the entire thing (20+ pages of highly technical copy) because she doesn’t like my structure or how I integrated the technical material into the legal argument. I told her I was somewhat surprised, because I’ve done these petitions for every other team in the office, and everyone else was happy with my work and uses the same format. Her reaction? “Well, I’ve never agreed with that format. I know everyone else uses it, but it’s just wrong, and my team doesn’t do things that way.” Never mind that everyone else has been having these petitions approved consistently for years, or believe me, they would have changed the way they are structured. Obviously, I have to do whatever she tells me, and so it will probably take me a whole day to redraft the fucking petition, and the researcher guy already knows the initial draft was completed and is probably wondering why he doesn’t have a draft to review yet.
So if you knew you did things differently than everyone else in the fucking field, WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU TELL ME BEFORE I SPENT HALF A WEEK DRAFTING THE FUCKING THING? And you wonder why your team’s billing is down and our productivity is lower than the rest of the office? What the fuck am I supposed to do to remain sane?
I’m now training to be a hairdresser which is much more fun. I’m still good friends with her younger brother and as such I hear about the people who have left or been forced out of the company by her deciding that she doesn’t like them. Including one of the founding directors. Bitch.