Aug 30 2002
People are Strange…
Sometimes I feel as if my job requires less paralegal type work such as marshalling facts and information, searching for ’smoking guns,’ organizing documents and creating databases than it requires coddling the various people with whom I work.
One of the secretaries here in the office is an emotional powder keg. One day, she’s giddy and giggles nonstop. The next day, she’s storming around the place with her eyes blazing and her muscles tensed, ready for confrontation. On yet another day, she bursts into tears and can’t stop crying. Today, she was panicked over the fact that all the contact information in her address book had disappeared. I tried helping her out since the network administrator hadn’t yet come in, but before I got very far fixing the actual problem, I had to stop what I was doing and run through a variety of scenarios just to calm her down: Well, if the addresses are gone forever and forever, then you’ll just have to re-enter them. You have a lot of them stored on your Palm right? The others, we can get after making a few calls. You probably won’t have to do that though. I’m sure we can figure out what happened to the information and restore your address book to the way it was yesterday afternoon…
As for the attorneys with whom I work, both are very intelligent and professional people. They’ve chalked up a lot of successes since they started practicing and I’ve learned a lot by working with them; however, they are two of the most high maintenance people I’ve ever been around. I’m not the only one who has noticed this.
Earlier today, I was sitting in my office yawning and rubbing my eyes. The mailroom clerk popped in to drop of some mail and caught me doing this. He said,”I bet I know why you’re so tired.”
“Oh really?” I replied, thinking he was about to make some comment about late nights with a baby.
“Yeah, your attorneys are wearing you out.”
True. He was right. They are wearing me out. It’s not so much what they ask me to do, as it is how much and how quickly they add to my task list. We administrative types joke that we never even go near those attorneys’ offices without a pen and pad of paper in hand prepared to take notes. The times we have ventured to do so, thinking only to drop off a memo or something similar, ended disastrously. Invariably, the moment we walk into their offices, they start rattling off a list of 1001 things they need us to attend to, and expect us to remember it all and to get it done in the next couple of hours. Even walking into their offices with a pen and paper isn’t a guarantee that we’ll be able to keep track of matters any better. It’s times like those when I wished I knew shorthand.
They’re also very demanding. They have specific requirements about how they like things done, which of course, are different from the general standards of the office. Trying to remember their particular preferences isn’t always easy, especially since I’ve been doing things differently for a couple of years now.
One of the scenarios which best illustrates how the challenges I face in pleasing these people is the Great Database Saga:
Almost one year ago, they asked me to set up a database that would allow them to manage the evidence they were collecting to prove their case. So, I did so. I created an Access database, entered the bulk of the data and set up some special queries. This project took several months.
They didn’t like it. Not because it wasn’t done well. It was. They didn’t like it because they didn’t know how to use Access. They wanted the database set up in Summation, which they had apparently used in their previous firm. OK. Sooooo, I set up a database in Summation, scanned all the documents and started coding them. They called me last week, while they were out of town, to tell me that the new database was unusable, that they were really at a disadvantage because they couldn’t find the documents they wanted. Duh. I had only begun entering data. There hadn’t been enough time to get most of it done. Of course they couldn’t perform the searches they wanted to.
Several weeks go by…more data is entered…
One of the attorneys comes into my office and complains that certain documents are missing from the database. I perform a quick search and those documents come up right away. They weren’t missing. After she asks a few more questions and I walk her through the processes to accomplish what she’s after, I realize: she doesn’t really know how to use this database either.
Ha ha ha! Aren’t people funny? (At least I’m laughing. Having put in months of work for nothing might have bugged the heck out of me at another time…)
