Date: June 7th, 2010
Like most 25 year olds, I've had a decent number of jobs in my life. In high school, I was a bagger at Gene's Fine Foods in Saratoga. That store produced some utterly fantastic stories and about a dozen arguments against unionization. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to get all political. I'm just saying, the number of times my troublemaking butt should've been fired from that place is not countable on a single hand. Or two hands. Maybe two hands and a foot.
I'm far enough removed from that job, I think I can get away with detailing my sixteen-year-old shenanigans. Let's see. Hitting on customers. That was numero uno. But to be fair, I did end up dating a customer for almost a year. Now he's an MMA fighter and ordained minister. There's not a joke in there. Its actually what happened. What else? Starting political discussions with customers. I saw no possible way that could've gone badly for me. There were Pringle fights in the warehouse. Of course, that did get my friend Kenny fired, but his union benefits hadn't kicked in yet (see what I mean?). I'd say, by far, the biggest mistake I made while working there was letting the boys in the meat department borrow my camera for an afternoon. What was seen cannot be unseen. Dating one of the guys over in produce lands at a close second.
For the most part, the jobs I've had since then have been about the shenanigans too. Of course, I got a bit less reckless in my old age. But the corporate jobs I've had were both pretty straightforward. The thing I remember most about working at Yahoo! was the giant stuffed shark I kept in my cubicle. And my boss teaching my the phrase "herding cats". I enjoyed it, but the way someone enjoys a sitcom. Cisco was the same thing. Highlights from Cisco include a circus themed intern event, the utterly fantastic corporate gym, and meeting Mario (who is an utterly delightful human being, by the way).
At each place, I genuinely enjoyed the work, enjoyed my bosses and was happy to have the job. There was never a moment, though, when I felt like the work I was doing was so important that I needed to take it home with me and work late. That was always something for executrons and investment bankers. I, the lowly, hourly intern, did not have access to such vital work that I would have, you know, deadlines.
I assumed, when I started at Legal Services, that it would be the same thing. Well, not exactly the same. It was clear from day one that the things I would remember about this job were vastly different from the hubbub I remembered from my previous jobs. There were, within the first week, clients who changed the way I view living in poverty, domestic violence and being taken advantage of. All those things became so much more real once I started working here.
Despite the severity of the work I've been doing, it has still been a 9to5 job. But that changed when I ran up against my first, honest to goodness, hard deadline. My boss asked me to do some research on a motion brief that had to be filed with the court the next day. For those who don't know, the motion is what you're asking the court to do and the brief is why you think the court should grant it. She asked me to try and find an argument for the brief because she'd been working on it for a while and kept feeling like there was a better way to argue it.
Being rampantly OCD, I know that feeling well. There is nothing more frustrating than being two steps away from perfect and not knowing how to get there. So, around 2pm, I took up the task of finding that last puzzle piece for the brief. I immediately encountered the same problem she had. I could feel the answer. It was... somewhere. What was happening to the client had to be wrong, legally, but gosh if there wasn't a single slam-dunk case I could find to support that belief.
When five o'clock rolled around, I packed up my stuff, intended to resume work on the brief in the morning. That's when I remembered that it was due the next day. So I did what any young legal intern, on the cusp of a great discovery, would do. I put aside my irrational fear of being labeled the office ass-kiss and went to ask if I could continue working on the brief into the wee hours of the morning if need be. My boss agreed that, if I was willing, that would be the thing to do.
Before I settled in for a night of uber-research, I stopped over to buy various caffeinated liquids and some sugar packed treats. Having not ever done the whole "take work home with me" thing before, I decided to treat it like having a paper due the next day. Best to hunker down, sugar up and hope for the best.
Turns out, my instinct was a good one. It felt a lot like having a paper due in the morning. There was the same sense of pressure, the same frustration every time a research lead didn't pay off, the same absurd rituals to stay awake. Who said anything about sorting skittles? There are no skittles here, man.
There was one, absolutely major, difference though. Unlike college and law school papers, I never had that moment of being utterly desperate to quit. See, usually, there comes a point around midnight, when the last seven hours have been devoted to research and writing, that my mind wants nothing more than to give in to the sweet surrender of sugarplum dreams and, umm, raisin nightmares, I guess. Anyway, the point is that I didn't have that moment.
Around 2am, after several hours of research and quite a bit of non-confidentiality violating help from my recent-law-school-graduate mom, I finished writing up the argument for our motion brief. Unlike the first dozen or so parried attempts at an argument, I wasn't standing two steps from perfect anymore. You can never know how a judge is going to rule before they do it, but what I can say is that the brief contains the best argument that Michigan law has to offer.
Wow. That sounded soooo much less egotistical in my head. What I'm trying to say that is that there isn't a piecemeal argument that (hopefully) amounts to proving our point anymore. The argument is a direct attack at the other side's position. Hopefully that makes me sound slightly less obnoxious.
In the meantime, my first experience taking work home with me was an incredibly good one. It was like school, but with a higher sense of purpose. I wasn't researching so I could prove to a professor that I'm more creative than the next guy. I was trying to change the way the court viewed an actual person in an actual situation. I think that's why I didn't have the usual midnight-crisis. There was so much more reason to be losing the sleep and carpeling the tunnel.
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