Abortion juice

I wrote about this briefly on Twitter, and realized it was one of those strange but funny stories that would be perfect for a blog post.

Back in college, I spent a year living with a fun-loving and completely batshit crazy woman we will call A. I had been an RA and A had been one of my residents, and we became fast friends. A liked to live on the wild side, though, and in that regard we really could not be more different. (I merely occasionally dabbled.) By way of example, I went to a Bush concert with A during that year, and she was tripping on acid. She decided during the show that Gavin Rossdale was her soulmate, and proceeded to force me to travel to other Bush shows for the better part of a year until she finally actually met the guy in person and he showed her zero interest. (Even back then he was hooking up with Gwen Stefani as they toured together.)

Anyhow, A was a bit of a hellion. She kept sheets of acid in our freezer, she had a fake ID she'd obtained by stealing a military ID from someone she babysat for in high school and altering the photograph with one of her own, and she was the first friend I ever had who was just unabashedly and unapologetically promiscuous. A had an endless stream of guys in her life, and somewhat famously kept a list on our refrigerator that she called her "Fuck List." In order, it listed every guy she slept with and she updated it religiously. (At the time, she made a Fuck List for me that was blank for most of that year, until I started dating the guy that I would move in with by the end of that year. Yes, I was a late bloomer.)

A wasn't great about birth control, however, since she was still on her father's military health insurance and had to go all the way to Panama City to get her birth control prescriptions filled. She somehow let the prescription lapse for awhile, and then she unexpectedly got pregnant. We panicked together as she peed on stick after stick, and tried to figure out what to do. At the time I was active in the FSU Women's Center and FSU NOW, and my good feminist friends with their knowledge of pre-Roe v. Wade methods of dealing with unwanted pregnancy told us about an old wives' tale that drinking a strong concoction of ginger juice could induce miscarriage.

A and I decided to try this, in the hopes that we could avoid the expensive and painful surgical abortion that she was otherwise going to have. We went to Publix and bought several pounds of raw ginger. I peeled it, cut it up, and boiled it in some water until it reduced down to a few cups. I made her try it, and it was awful. She said she couldn't possibly drink it, so we decided to add it to a jug of Kool-Aid. I mixed half of a large jug of red cherry Kool-Aid, and added the ginger liquid. We let it cool, and then I poured A a big glass. She insisted that I had to try it first, because she was worried she might hurl. I will never EVER forget the terrible flavor of that one sip that I took. I thought it might burn my throat, the spiciness of the ginger was so strong. But I tried to keep a brave face and show A that she could drink this stuff. She managed to suffer through about half a glass before giving up. We put the jug back into the fridge, intending to try again the next day.

We must have either given up on the "abortion juice" or forgotten about it, because a week later it was still in the back of the fridge. Around about this time I had started getting semi-involved with G, and after a party at our place he had slept over on the sofa. (We weren't officially dating at this point.) I woke up early the next day to go to class, and when I returned he was sleeping in my bed. I woke him up, and after we talked for awhile he asked me what the hell kind of alcohol we were brewing in our fridge. I stared at him puzzled for a second, and then realized that he meant the abortion juice. Turns out, G had gotten up in the middle of the night looking for a drink, and had found what looked like a jug of red Kool-Aid in the back of the fridge. He had poured a big glass, taken a swig, and been met with the unholy burn of concentrated ginger. When I told him the story of what he had just drank, I laughed so hard I nearly peed.

Ultimately we abandoned the abortion juice idea, and A went through the usual method of terminating the pregnancy. I was there, holding her hand, through the whole procedure. That entire experience made me hyper-vigilant about my own birth control methods once I had occasion to employ them a couple months later, when I finally wrote a name on my own Fuck List. But, I had completely forgotten about abortion juice until a friend from college blogged today about making homemade ginger beer, and that awful taste memory came flooding back. None for me, thanks.

Jobs I've Had Part VII: The ambulance chaser

(We're now at the boring part of my work history, i.e. the legal jobs. Sorry in advance.)

In Spring of 1997 I went back to school full time to finish my BA and decided I should try to get another job as a part time legal secretary to get some additional legal experience. A personal injury and worker's comp attorney in Tallahassee had placed an ad with FSU's career development office for a part time legal secretary, and I applied and was hired on the spot thanks to being the only applicant he had who still knew how to run MS-DOS. Yes, I managed to find someone who was clinging to old school technology like a life raft, and luckily thanks to my parents' outdated computers in their business I was uniquely qualified to help him. I worked 20 hours per week, mostly afternoons, transcribing tapes and handling the phones and scheduling. Quickly I progressed from menial secretarial tasks to actually taking first crack at drafting motions, petitions, discovery, etc. I was even allowed to take calls from potential clients and decide which should be passed on to the attorney and which should be advised to call elsewhere.

In this job, I really saw the inside of a plaintiff's personal injury practice for the first time. The attorney I worked for had the largest payout on record in the state of Florida for a worker's comp case, and he only handled premium cases. I spent much of that semester working on a case for a man who had been injured in a terrible car accident while on the job that left him profoundly brain-injured. My boss was trying to negotiate a large settlement and was on the brink when the client unexpectedly died in the middle of the night from a diabetic episode. I took the distraught call from our client's wife that morning, and I will never forget it.

I also made one mistake in that job that I will never live down: I scheduled a hearing and then put it in the calendar for the wrong time. I don't think I have ever seen someone as mad as my boss was that day, but thankfully I had made the appointment earlier rather than later, so he had simply shown up in the courtroom an hour early. Still, it taught me the importance of double and triple checking everything that involves interaction with the judge.

I also gave my first deposition right before I left for law school, in a case my boss filed against an FSU student who had rented the apartment behind our office building and left the place in a shambles when she moved out. I had been the first person into the apartment after she vacated, and my boss was worried that because I would be in Boston he needed to preserve my testimony about what I saw before I left. He coached me on the importance of giving short answers, only answering the question asked, and to always remember that if I found myself talking and I didn't know why, to shut up immediately. It is advice that I still give to every person I prepare for deposition even today, and I tell them this story: despite that extensive coaching, and despite the opposing party not even sending someone to the deposition, I still found myself responding to a question halfway through the deposition when I looked up and saw my boss glaring at me. I realized that I had gone on to answer the question I thought he would ask next, without waiting for him to ask it, despite his explicit instructions. I still use that experience today to illustrate my preparation suggestions for my clients.

I left that office when I moved to Boston in the fall of 1997, and did not work at all my first year of law school because it is generally prohibited by the school. I did get a little blast from the past the next summer in the form of a subpoena to give a deposition about this attorney's billing practices. In worker's comp cases in Florida, where a claimant's attorney is successful he can have his attorney's fees paid by the insurance company of the employer. He has to submit a bill detailing the hours spent on the case and a reasonable hourly fee, and then there is a fee hearing to determine whether the hours were actually spent and were reasonable, and whether the hourly rate is reasonable. One of the insurance companies was fighting my boss's fee for a particular case, and wanted me to testify about how he recorded his time. I had typed the dictation he prepared of all his work on the case, based upon his review of the extensive file and his estimate of how long each task took. I managed to call up the attorney who subpoenaed me, convince him I would not be helpful, and get him to agree not to try and depose me. Afterwards I called my boss to fill him in, and it was the last time I ever spoke to him. When I go to football games in Tallahassee, I drive by the old mansion converted into an office building where he practiced and wonder if he is still there.

Jobs I've Had Part VI: The Temp

In the fall of 1996, I decided to apply to work with a temp agency. I was only going to take one course at night that semester, and I wanted a job that I could quit or take a sabbatical on when I returned to school full time at some point. I worked with Randstad, which placed me in a variety of clerical positions. I only recall three of the many jobs that I worked in during those six months.

Columbia HCA

In the 1990's Columbia was probably the largest private for-profit hospital corporation in the country. I worked for several weeks at their consulting division, which would be retained by medical practices to analyze their business model and find ways to save money or function better. They would spend months producing one massive bound volume that contained their recommendations, and I was brought in to help with the process of preparing and finalizing that physical document. I remember next to nothing about it.

Talquin Electric Cooperative

I was sent to a small electric company outside Tallahassee called Talquin Electric Cooperative. It serviced the small towns outside the suburbs of the city, many of which were lower income. I originally was just the receptionist, answering the telephones and signing in people who were there to see one of the account managers. The customers who came into the office looked like an audience of Springer, and it was heartbreaking to see so many people drive all the way to the electric company to make a scrounged-together $20 payment and beg them not to shut off their power.

Overwhelmingly most of the calls I answered were people wanting to either try to make payment arrangements or to find out why their power had been shut off, and after a few weeks the account managers started letting me look at their accounts in the computer system and talk to them about their payment issues. It took a load off the account managers and prevented callers from staying on hold so long, but as a result I got yelled at at least 3 or 4 times a day by some irate person whose power had been shut off during a hot Tallahassee day.

I think I worked at Talquin for about 2 months before they hired a permanent receptionist, a very sweet but slightly dumb girl who I trained to replace me.

The Department of Transportation Office of the General Counsel

I was sent to be a legal secretary for two litigation attorneys in the State of Florida's Department of Transportation. I opened their mail, drafted their documents from dictation, handled their filing, and did other various administrative tasks. The FLDOT had a variety of types of cases, everything from recovering for property damage when a drunk driver took out a guardrail to a slip and fall at a rest stop.

The majority of the cases that I recall working on involved the train lines that ran through South Florida. The only cases that I remember involved two different sets of teenaged boys that died when they were hit by trains on the same stretch of track in West Palm Beach. The train tracks ran over a trestle, which was essentially a bridge over a canal that was only about a foot wider on each side than the tracks themselves. This particular trestle was a popular place to go fishing, but because trains came around a curve about 100 yards down the track, people fishing on the tracks did not get much warning. In the first case, two children had been sitting on the tracks when the train approached and had gotten up and started running but did not make it to the other side of the trestle. In the second case, a man had taken his child and a friend of the child fishing at that same location, and had told them about the first case as a way to make them be vigilant at all times to watch for approaching trains. He had also told the boys there were alligators in the canal, ostensibly also so that they would be careful to watch for a train. When a train did approach, the two boys were so scared about the alligators that they did not jump off the trestle, even as the father screamed at them to jump. I can recall receiving an envelope addressed to one of the FLDOT attorneys in the case, and opening it to find it contained the autopsy photos of the two boys who had been hit. I felt absolutely sick to my stomach for the rest of the day as a result.

I worked at the FLDOT for several months and became very good friends with the attorneys I worked with. They knew I wanted to go to law school, and one of them eventually wrote me a recommendation letter when I left to go back to school full time for spring semester.

I expected to hate temping, and sometimes it was very awkward to show up at a place where nobody had an incentive to get to know you because they presumed you would be gone in a few days. There was also a persistent belief that temps were usually incompetent, so I was frequently told that it was surprising I could figure out how to do someone's job while they were out. It was insulting to have people treat me as though they expected me to be a moron, even if they later ended up pleasantly surprised when I was not. But temping paid my bills, and it gave me my first bit of legal experience that inspired me to go back and finish my BA and get to law school. One of the attorneys I worked for had gone to BU Law, and he was a big part of the reason I decided to apply there. As luck would have it, I got a pretty sweet scholarship from them so I should probably have thanked him.


Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!

Jobs I've Had Part V: The Randoms

In between the lobbyist gig and my next job working for a temp agency, I had a few fitfull attempts at other jobs for a few days or weeks at a time.

In 1996, an environmental organization was trying to get a ballot question on the Florida ballot that would force the state to clean up and preserve the Florida everglades. The 'Glades had been polluted and harmed by sugar farming down there for decades, and the sugar industry was a powerful lobby in Florida. The goal was to create a constitutional amendment requiring the state to prevent future pollution and to clean up the past effects. The organizations had been trying this for years, but they finally raised millions of dollars to front this referendum and were mounting a serious campaign. In order to place the issue on the ballot, the state was requiring something like 500,000 valid signatures from registered voters, and the campaign had raised millions so that they could pay people $1 per signature to get at least 1 million people signed up. (These sorts of campaigns always build in a cushion to account for signatures that will be thrown out because they can't be verified or are repeats.)

To a college student, $1 a signature sounds like a gold mine...you just find a crowded place and you could have earned $50 an hour. We had heard stories of people who had gone to an outdoor concert or a county fair and made $200 in just a few hours. The $1 per signature was paid out when you turned your signature pad in, even if the signer turned out to not be registered in Florida or to have previously signed the petition another time. My boyfriend and I decided this sounded like a great way to make lots of money very fast.

(This experience gave me some insight into the problems with fake registrations during the 2008 election, as I was fairly certain that the people turning in those fake registrations had also been paid per registration and thus had a powerful incentive to abuse the system. Not that we ever did anything like that with the signatures!)

We got our clipboards full of petitions and headed to a parking lot of a strip mall to accost people heading into or out of the Barnes and Noble. We quickly learned that getting people to sign this thing was tougher than we'd heard, particularly when store management would come out and ask us to leave. We'd move to another strip mall and start over, but we were averaging only about 5 signatures an hour apiece. We discovered that many people had already signed and did not want to fill out the lengthy form to do so again. Others had started seeing the ads run by the sugar industry against the proposed referendum, and wanted to argue with us. After about a week we decided this job was a bust and we turned in our clipboards. I think we maybe cleared $50 each.

Gabe and I worked together on two other occasions with similarly disastrous results. First, we saw an ad in the paper for a telephone sales job and both showed up to the address listed to find that it was circulation sales for the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper. I lasted all of one night before deciding that I absolutely hated telephone sales and would rather starve than try that again. Gabe went back for the rest of the week, because he actually sort of liked pissing people off, but even he burned out by the end of the week. I don't think I made a single sale before I quit.

We also worked for a department store, I think Dillard's faxing sale advertisements to local public schools for a teachers' discount promotion the store was running. We each sat in separate offices in the administrative part of the department store for 2 days faxing the same 1 page ad to several dozen local schools at a time. However, because the department store had gotten in trouble for sending un-requested faxes before, we had to call each school and reach a real live person to get their permission to fax the notice to each one. This was almost as unpleasant as telephone sales, and made worse by Gabe's constant need to make everything into a contest. This was probably why we never worked together again after that 2 day gig. I also recognized that I was not cut out for a career in sales, and vowed never to try to take on that sort of job ever again.

After a month or so of these odd jobs and the fear of living without a steady income, I was thinking of going home to Orlando to work for Disney for the rest of the summer but I was afraid my parents would find out about my school issues. I decided to apply to work for a temp agency, which was where I worked for the remainder of the summer and the fall semester. That story will be a separate post.


Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!

Jobs I've Had Part IV: the Lobbyist

When I returned to FSU for my junior year, I unfortunately had far less money saved from my summer job than I'd hoped. I had moved into an expensive apartment with my crazy friend Amanda (crazy like she went to a Bush concert while tripping and believed for over a year afterwards that Gavin Rossdale was in love with her crazy, not like haha wacky crazy) and knew that at some point during the school year I would need to get a job. Unfortunately I'd also gotten roped into running for and winning a Student Senate seat, thanks to Amanda signing us up to volunteer for a student political party and saying yes on behalf of both of us when they called to ask if they could run us as candidates instead. It was fun, but it was time-consuming and made even moreso because I met the man who I would almost marry, Gabe, while campaigning for the seat. So suddenly I had this extra-curricular activity and this boyfriend, and a full courseload, and no money. It was kind of a problem.

Luckily in January I heard about a friend who had been working for a lobbyist in the Florida legislature. He had fired another employee because she dared to get mononucleosis, which when you are working to accomplish lots of legislative priorities in a session that is only three months long is apparently an unforgiveable sin. The friend managed to talk me up as the sick girl's replacement, and I was hired for what at the time was the obscene rate of $10 per hour. There were two drawbacks: first, I'd have to be there every day at 7am to open the office. Second: I had to agree to work whenever he wanted, or I'd be fired just like the last girl. I was desperate for money, so I didn't mind. As added bonus, we were all paid under the table so I wouldn't have to worry about taxes.

This was about 1996, and Florida's legislature had just gone Republican for the first time in ages. The lobbyist I worked for was from South Florida and was also a political consultant to various Democratic politicians in the area. He was still coping with the change in the power structure, as were we all by extension. Most of my day was spent sending faxes on upcoming votes, important legislative priorities, and other news items to the various legislators' offices. Any fax that we sent out had to go to well over a hundred people, and it could take hours to complete. I remember on one occasion being called in early on a Saturday morning for a faxing project, and the document I was sending was so long that it took roughly 10 minutes to send to each recipient. I would type in the number, put the document in, and hit send and take a nap on the floor. When the fax was done it would beep, I'd wake up, and send the next fax. I did this for 10 hours straight.

At the time, many of the people who are now making a name for themselves nationally were in the Florida legislature. Charlie Crist, Katharine Harris, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and Robert Wexler all started out as state legislators and were serving in about this time period. Katharine Harris in particular stands out to me because she had this hilarious official portrait of herself hanging in the Capitol. She had her hair in a bun with a massive bubble at the top, looking like she was a librarian or a school principal (think the principal's hairdo in the movie "Pump Up the Volume"). Even then the rumor was that she was crazy. Charlie Crist was known as "Chain Gang Charlie" back then for repeatedly introducing legislation to bring chain gangs to Florida.

In addition to the endless faxing, we also ran various errands at the Capitol for the lobbyist. Often it was delivering donation checks or picking up revised versions of legislation. I recall two legislative initiatives that he was really working hard that session: viaticals, and tow trucks. I don't really recall the particulars on the tow truck issue but I know that a lot of tow truck owner organizations were donating a lot of money that session so they were obviously working some issue hard.

Viaticals were a much more compelling story. The viatical industry essentially buys up the beneficiary rights to a terminally ill person's life insurance policy and pays them out a portion of the proceeds in advance while they are still alive. The company makes its money when the person dies and they collect the full value of the policy. At the time, the industry was flourishing primarily by contracting with individuals with HIV. In the mid-1990's HIV was still considered a certain death sentence within a decade, and many of the individuals who were diagnosed did not have children or any other family that they particularly wanted their life insurance proceeds to go to. They argued powerfully and persuasively that they should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their life insurance now to make their remaining years more comfortable, rather than living austerely and then seeing the money go to next of kin once they were gone. It was a tough issue and there were strong opinions all around. We were lobbying in support of the industry and against legislation that would have prohibited viatical contracts in Florida, and the strategy was to put the real stories of people who had entered into these contracts before the legislators and allow them to hear how the availability of this option had improved their last few years of life. We were able to defeat the legislation, though the industry has been under continued attack in Florida since then.

This job was certainly interesting and it looked good on a resume, but it wreaked complete havoc on my life that semester. My work hours were supposed to be from 7-10, go attend classes until 1, come back and work until the lobbyist told me I was done. I frequently worked until 9 or 10, sometimes later. Instead of going to classes during my midday break, I was often so tired that I went home and slept from 10-1, and I started missing a ton of class time. I was also so constantly exhausted from waking up at 6 to get to work by 7 that I would fall asleep in my car at red lights, or at the table when we were out at a restaurant. Gabe and I went to a Barnes and Noble one Saturday and I ended up sleeping in a chair for three hours. I normally am awakened at the slightest noise or movement in the room, so I have to be completely wiped out to sleep in a public, bright place. It was then that I decided being a morning person was never going to be my thing.

I'd stopped going to all of my classes by midway through the semester, and I expected to fail all of them. This was supposed to be my last semester in school, because I had been on track to graduate a year early. Instead, I had flunked out. I was a complete mess about it, but sort of felt immobilized about the whole thing. I would ultimately take the next semester off, convince the school to let me retroactively withdraw from all of my Spring 1996 classes, and restore my GPA to its former respectability before applying to law schools in spring of 1997. I was extremely lucky in that regard, as law school would not have been an option if a flunked out semester had stayed on my transcript. It helped that my grades had been fantastic except for that one abberration, so I'd been able to argue that I was working too much and that it was completely out of character for me to miss so much class. Thankfully I was able to get my transcript fixed BEFORE my parents found out about that semester, so I could tell them that the situation was already taken care of. I thought they were going to absolutely lose their shit when they found out. To this day, I still have nightmares about that time in my life and all the anxiety I felt about having screwed my future.

After the legislative session ended in May, there was talk of me continuing to work part time for the lobbyist while he was down in South Florida, checking the mail and completing various administrative tasks. I didn't particularly want to keep working there, and I was not at all disappointed when the lobbyist never contacted me with details about continuing part-time work. I turned in my key and started looking for something else.


Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!

Jobs I've Had Part III: Mickey's Character Shop

The summer after my sophomore year, fresh off the RA gig, I returned home to live with my parents in Orlando for the first time since I had gone off to college (on account of having stayed and taken classes the previous summer.) I needed to find a job, and as every kid in Orlando knows, working at Disney is the easiest option because they are always hiring for the summer and they pay better than everyone else. I applied, interviewed, and was hired to work at the largest store on Disney property: Mickey's Character Shop.

Disney has a college internship program where college students come to Orlando and live in Disney dorms, work at Disney, and receive college credit. Hundreds of college students do this every year, and the Character Shop had at least 20 from various states. There were also several people like me who lived in Orlando and were home from college for the summer, so we had a good sized college crew. The rest of the staff was mostly people in their 40's and older, who had been working at Disney for years. It was a strange split between the two groups, and the college students all tended to stick together and go out drinking after work, while the "lifers" went home to families and regular life. Because every Disney employee has a pass to get into the parks whenever they want, on a lot of nights we would go next door to Pleasure Island and go clubbing, or we'd head to one of the parks for the last hour it was open and ride a couple rides before they shut down.

I worked as a cashier and stockperson, and it's tough to say which of those roles was worse. As a cashier you would see an endless stream of tourists buying crap and often wanting you to ship it for them back to whatever country they lived in. Disney offers impeccable customer service, but in so doing they make life extremely difficult for their employees. If a "guest," as we were always instructed to call them, wanted to buy several thousand dollars worth of tacky breakable crap and ship it to Timbuktu, I had to make all the shipping arrangements at the register and then take their haul to the back and spend hours packaging it all carefully. Or if a guest was staying on property (in one of the Disney hotels, as opposed to a nearby chain hotel not affiliated with Disney), they had the option to have everything they bought in any park or store on property sent back to their rooms at no charge. People who shop their way through Disney World, having little packages of crap shipped to their room at each stop. This also could take hours to accomplish.

Stocking was just as physically difficult as cashiering was annoying. During the high tourist season, the store would be picked to the bone in just hours unless it was constantly re-stocked by the employees. We were supposed to have every stuffed animal arranged neatly, and yet children would climb into the bins of stuffed animals, throw them everywhere, and leave it looking like a plushie bomb had gone off. I would often spend an hour rearranging the massive stuffed animal display in the middle of the store, only to go in the back to get more stock and come back to find it destroyed all over again. Between the shopping hordes taking all of the merchandise and the children messing up our displays, a stocking shift was eight straight hours of physical madness. But at least the time passed more quickly than at the cash register.

Occasionally I was called upon to work the jewelry or watch counter, which involved showing customers a specific watch or piece of jewelry in the case. We were constantly counseled to be vigilant about shoplifters, and the stores always had security personnel dressed as tourists who watched for signs of shoplifting. It became infuriating, however, because even when a customer was very likely shoplifting, the company was loathe to confront a guest and ruin their Disney experience if there was any doubt at all that they had intended to steal an item, as opposed to misunderstanding somehow or accidentally carrying it out of the store. At one point during our summer, an entire family was arrested in the parking lot with a van full of merchandise they had been loading all day. They would walk into the store with a Disney shopping bag, load it with merchandise, and leave without paying for any of it. They repeated this for hours, and apparently had been doing it for months in order to ship the merchandise overseas and sell it on the black market. We also frequently had groups of 15 year old girls from Latin American countries on their quincenaros (15th birthday) trips who would come into the store and leave stacks of empty watch boxes, empty hangers and clothing tags behind in the dressing rooms...because they had carried in heaps of merchandise and then crammed it into purses or put it on so that they could walk out without paying for it. It was very frustrating as an employee to see all this theft and be powerless to stop it.

Disney is a strange and interesting place in a lot of ways. Two stories really stand out for me that summer, and they both involved the same poor guy named Shepherd. Shepherd was a young, very shy and very geeky college student from the midwest who it seemed had led a very sheltered life. He had flaming red hair (seriously, it makes mine seem dull in comparison) and that redheaded complexion that cal bloom into full red blushing in a second. We all liked Shepherd because he let us tease him and force that blushing at every opportunity, and he was just a really sweet guy. One day he was working at the watch counter during Disney's Gay Day (still unofficial back then), and was hit on very loudly and obviously by a male patron who told him he had a thing for redheads. I thought Shepherd was going to turn purple, he was so embarassed. But he just blushed like a madman and quietly told the guy that he was working and couldn't socialize.

Shepherd had the misfortune of working in the children's department one night when he noticed a man standing in the corner acting strangely. This store had a separate children's wing off to one side, and the store sort of curved around so people in the main part of the store could not really see the children's department dressing rooms or the register in the back (which we had christened "No Man's Land" for this very reason.) At the point where the store bent sharply to the right to lead into the children's section, a man stood in the corner with his hands in his pants fumbling. After watching him for a few minutes, Shepherd quietly called security. He told them that he thought a pedophile was in the children's department, masturbating as he watched small children come out of the dressing rooms with their parents while trying on new clothes. Before security could arrive, the guy was gone. We were all counseled to be vigilant to look for any suspicious behavior like that, especially since there were so many children around Disney at all times that it was very easy for a child to become lost and whisked away by a predator. (You would not believe how often every single night we would either find a child wandering aimlessly without a parent, usually crying so hard he or she could not even give a name, or worse a hysterical parent running around screaming that someone had taken their baby. Thankfully we didn't lose a single one that whole summer.)

Shepherd also told us an even more outrageous story that illustrates the interesting cultural differences we encountered at Disney. One night he was walking back from the cafeteria where we all ate dinner during our breaks, and he stopped into a public restroom. On his way in, he saw a woman wearing a vaguely middle eastern head covering who was squatting down in the bushes outside the ladies' room. He watched her for a second, and was horrified to see that she fumbled around, stood up, bent over and picked up a pile of feces which she carried into the ladies' room. Apparently this woman could not get accustomed to new-fangled sit down toilets, so she assumed the position for her usual squat toilet, did her business, and then disposed of the waste inside. Disney employees were always counseled about the importance of respect for the cultural differences of our international visitors, so he let the woman go on her way. And then ran back to the store to tell us all about it.

The experience of working at Disney for the summer gave me a great appreciation for how tightly they run the organization. Every single detail is carefully planned, and the lengths to which Disney goes to make sure everything is perfect is breathtaking. Before we could start work, we had to go through a two day training program in which we learned absolutely nothing about the job we were going to do. It was all about Disney culture, history, and what they expected out of their employees. For TWO DAYS. We were also told that secret shoppers were in the stores frequently and would measure things like how quickly we verbally greeted every patron who came within three feet of us. (We were supposed to do it in under 10 seconds.) The lingo, things like calling them guests, was grilled into us, as was the answer to the most common question we were asked by children: how can Mickey Mouse be in several different places at the same time? The only acceptable answer was that Mickey moved very quickly. If you admitted to a child guest that Mickey Mouse was actually a guy in a mouse suit, you would be fired on the spot. Any other tough questions that we got from patrons could be answered by calling the Information Center, which was set up just to answer random guest questions like "how many parking spaces are there in the Magic Kingdom parking lot?" Yes, they really hired people whose job it was to sit at a computer and answer phoned in questions like this all day.

I had a lot of fun working at Disney, but I didn't save very much money on account of the going out every night with my coworkers thing. I frequently got home well after 2am, and it felt like I barely saw my parents that summer. I think every kid who lives in Orlando has to work at Disney at least once in their lives, though, just to see the amazing behind the scenes workings. Having been in the tunnels beneath Magic Kingdom is one of those experiences that only the precious few ever get to enjoy, and it is remarkable to see in action. There are tunnel tours offered on occasion, and I think everyone should take one if you get the chance. That place is, quite literally, a well-oiled machine.

Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!

Jobs I've Had Part II: I was a college dorm Resident Assistant

(I was going to do college in one part, but I realized this story is long enough that it deserves its own post. I will probably break up the rest of my college jobs into separate posts, too.)

My freshman year at Florida State, I did not work so that I could "focus on my studies." I'd saved a few thousand dollars working before I left and hoped that would tide me through 4 years of spending money at FSU. Unfortunately I spent 3/4 of it in my first year, so it was apparent I was going to have to work at some point to pay for any extracurricular activities I wanted to have. FSU had a strange rule that every in-state student had to attend one summer session, so I got it out of the way my freshman summer and stayed to take a full course load. I did not work at all that summer, which probably contributed a fair amount to my monetary woes.

Sophomore year I was a Resident Assistant in Salley Hall, which was a paid position. If I remember correctly, my single dorm room fee was discounted and I also got a small stipend every semester. In this job I was supposed to organize activities for my residents, make sure they didn't get in any trouble, and also work in the dorm's front office and do rounds at night once a week. I was also, sadly, on call for every fire alarm. Salley Hall was one of the worst on campus for fire alarms, so that meant at least 2-3 times a week I was awakened in the middle of the night and had to get all of my girls outside quickly and then search the rooms for the sleepy stragglers.

At the end of my year as an RA, I won an award entitled "Most Likely to Have the Most UNLIKELY Resident Problem." You see, in the span of 9 months my 30 girls had the following issues:

1. A resident who was only 17 showed up pregnant, didn't want to tell her parents (who had to consent to any medical care) and wanted to have the baby. She gave birth 2 months after she turned 18, midway through spring semester. Thankfully she had moved out of the dorm a few weeks earlier so I didn't have to deal with her going into labor.

2. Another resident was working as a call girl using ads in the back of a small alt-weekly newspaper. She was arrested and expelled.

3. Another resident had a boyfriend back in Miami who carjacked a Honda, drove up to Tallahassee to see her, and parked the stolen car in the lot downstairs from our dorm despite there being an APB out for the car. Thankfully they were not in the dorm when the car was located, and he was arrested elsewhere in Tallahassee.

4. Another group of girls were growing pot in their closet. The cops found it during one of the many fire alarms we had. They did not get expelled but they did get in a lot of trouble.

5. Another girl was sleeping with a guy who had told her he was a walk-on wide receiver for FSU's football team named Aaron Daly. He was not, in fact, the real Aaron Daly but some guy named Tom. We found this out by getting ahold of the media guide and finding the real Aaron's picture. We then asked around until someone put us in touch with Aaron Daly and got him and Scott Bentley (FSU's star kicker in the previous year's national championship game) to come to our dorm and meet the fake Aaron Daly. Apparently he had been impersonating the guy to get laid for well over a year. After we set up the meeting, asskicking may have ensued. And the girl who was sleeping with fake Aaron Daly was quite devastated.

But by far the most interesting and awful situation I encountered as an RA was a student who was awkward in every way humanly possible. While I don't intend this to be mean-spirited, there is really no other way for me to put it: she was incredibly unattractive, and socially inept. She and her roommates fought constantly, and were the source of much conflict. At the end of the first semester, however, this girl had a life-changing event. She found a boyfriend who was (again, not trying to be mean-spirited but just how I recall it) equally unattractive and socially inept. They were instantly inseparable, and one day my girls came to me to complain. It seems the girlfriend and boyfriend had taken to having sex in the study room on our floor. The study room had no door and was visible from the hall, so it was apparently really bothering the other girls that they would periodically randomly catch these two in the act. I talked to the girl and told her that I understood the problem of not having a place to get it on when you both live in dorms, but that they simply had to find a better place than the study room.

Later on, the girl's roommates came to me with an even more interesting and disgusting problem. Apparently, this girl had a gastrointestinal issue for which she was treating with campus doctors. The doctor had requested that she bring in a stool sample, and she had dutifully collected one in a little vial. She had stored it in the refrigerator. And then she had not ever bothered to take it in to the doctor's office. The roommates came to me after this little vial of poop had been in their community dorm fridge for over two weeks. Once again, I had to go talk to this girl and tell her that not only did she need to dispose of the vial immediately, but she also needed to scrub down the inside of the fridge with bleach and stop storing bodily waste inside it. I could barely say this with a straight face.

Overall I was kind of a lousy RA because I became pretty good friends with my residents and this undermined my ability to play disciplinarian with them. It's pretty tough to discipline someone for underage drinking when you just committed it with them. One of those residents even became my roommate the next year, and because she was crazy (and I don't mean crazy like weird or wacky...I mean full on mental illness) it turned out to be a total disaster. But that is a story for another time.

I had the option to renew my RA position for another year, but I was ready to be out of the dorms. It was a good learning experience but also very difficult thanks to all the unexpected problems that arose, so I'm not sure I would do it all over again if I could.

Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!

Jobs I've Had Part I: High School

Rusty has been chronicling the strange and interesting jobs he's held through the years, and it inspired me to do the same. I'm going to try to break them down into 4 parts: high school, college, law school, and lawyerin'.

Babysitting

I started off in high school with a regular Saturday night babysitting gig for a family with one child. The parents were both actors, and the dad also worked full time as an executive at Disney. (He also played the airplane passenger who gets shot in the head by the hijacker in "Passenger 57," in front of Wesley Snipes.) Every single Saturday night for almost two years I sat for their daughter Alyssa, from when she was a few months old until she was two. It was decent money for a 14 year old, and since she had an early bedtime I basically just watched TV for a few hours. I saw every single episode of Twin Peaks this way!

Gift Shops

When I turned 16 and was old enough to work for real, I got a job working for a company that operated gift shops in hotels throughout Orlando's International Drive tourist corridor. I would usually work with another employee but sometimes alone, running the cash register, stocking the store, and sitting around for hours at a time. We had a service that allowed customers to drop off camera film and receive their pictures the next day, and when we got bored we would look through the photos waiting to be picked up. Most of them were your standard touristy shots of theme parks and beaches, but when a rainy day would hit in the midst of the Orlando summers, we always knew that a day or two later there would be a rash of naked pictures. It seems that when stuck in their hotel rooms because of the rain, tourists like to create a little amateur porn. It was very difficult to keep a straight face as people came to pick up their photos not knowing that I had just a few hours earlier seen them naked.

We did have one little bit of drama at this job, when one of the stores was robbed while another woman was working there. She had been suspected of having a drug problem and the owners thought she had either staged the robbery or set it up with friends as the robbers, and soon thereafter she was fired for skimming off the register so there might have been something to the suspicion. I was so paranoid about getting in trouble for my register being short that I routinely put change from my purse into the register if I was short a few cents.

Golf Stores

The next year I persuaded my parents that I could work part-time while in high school, and I got a job working at a chain of golf stores owned by a friend of my father's. The largest store was also on International Drive, but I worked most often at a smaller more pathetic one up near the former Naval Training Center. I was the youngest person working in the company, and there was a fair amount of resentment towards me for getting the job. The company was owned by a group of brothers, and several stores were also managed and staffed by members of another family. Most of them had been working there for years, and I think seeing their job done by a high schooler must have made them feel threatened. Ultimately I ended up being scheduled most often at the NTC store because it was not managed by anyone from that family, though one of the sons was trying to get the manager fired so he could take over. The actual manager was an incredibly nice but not so bright guy who was the sole breadwinner for a very large family, so I was constantly worried the efforts to force him out would be successful.

Despite having grown up around golf and enjoying watching the sport, I am actually a terrible golfer myself. However, I was a pretty good salesperson and after about 3 months of just letting me sell shoes, gloves and golfballs, they let me start selling clubs. The clubs carried a hefty commission so I tried to let the salespeople who relied much more on commissions take those sales as often as possible. I felt pretty guilty as a teenager taking a sale away from someone who was trying to support a family. Each store had a big net set up in back to serve as a driving range so people could test out the clubs, but the very small NTC store's testing range was really just a small room in the back where the net was mostly a formality. The wall behind the net had a few holes in it from being repeatedly pelted by golf balls over the years, and one day an employee of the furniture store next door came by carrying a golf ball that had somehow ended up in their store. We tried to patch the holes with duct tape, which looked really classy. We also had a small putting green, and when I got bored I would practice putting. I am still pretty decent at minigolf now thanks to all that practice.

When there were no customers in the store, which was often, we had a TV that we could watch but we were only supposed to have golf on at all times. We had videos of major tournaments past, and all the golf movies that had been made to that point (which pretty much consisted of Caddyshack, Caddyshack 2, and Dead Solid Perfect.) I have seen Caddyshack so many times I could probably recite it for you word for word to this day. But watching the same golf movie over and over again was still a better option to pass the time than talking to a bunch of men in their 30s and 40s, which was you can imagine was not a lot of fun for a 17 year old.

Golf, as you may or may not know, is a surprisingly sexist sport and industry. There were very few women working for the company and I always worked with at least one man in each store. One guy, who was in his sixties, used to talk about my breasts constantly while I was at work. When he went on vacation with his wife, he sent us a clipped out ad for the TV show COPS, that said simply "Big Busts." He addressed it to me. (I was already kind of chesty at 17.) Another salesman tried to kiss me in the stockroom, even though he was easily 20 years older than me and looked like fat Elvis.

But the worst was a guy named Vince who was an old family friend of the family that managed several of the stores, who got ahold of my home telephone number. At that time I had a private line installed in my bedroom, and one night I got a call from a heavy breather who asked me a couple questions like whether I had a boyfriend and whether I liked to fuck, before I hung up on him. I sort of recognized the voice, but it was the use of the phrase "y'uns" that really clued me in to who it was. This guy was from Ohio and was the only person I knew who used that phrase. I told my parents about it, and my dad called the owner of the stores. They said they couldn't prove it was Vince without a trace of the call, and told me to have it traced if it happened again. A few days later, I had to work with Vince at the NTC store. I'd told my manager about it and he promised to keep an eye on things, but about 3:00 he had to do the bank deposit and told me he'd be back in 20 minutes. I was working at the register up front, and Vince was in the back. A few minutes after the manager left, the phone rang. When I picked it up, it was the same heavy breather. But interestingly enough, another line in the store was also active. Vince had called me from the back room. I told my manager when he got back, and the company agreed that Vince and I would not be scheduled together anymore. They also told him that if I got anymore phone calls like that, he'd be fired. A few weeks later I found out he did get fired, for stealing company merchandise and selling it on the side. A real shady character, that one.

I was also working at a store on International Drive when it was robbed. I was working with two men, one of whom was at lunch while another was in the back working. A group of two men and two women had come in to look at Gore Tex rainsuits, but then had left. I was working on ringing up a big sale to two other customers when suddenly one of them said a man had come out of the dressing room, grabbed a stack of rainsuits off the rack, and run out the back door. I didn't even see him until he was gone, because I had been so focused on ringing in the sale. Apparently the rainsuits that we carried were retailing for upwards of $200, and so they had taken over $1000 worth of merchandise. I immediately called the manager in the back, and he called the police. There was a lot of worry and drama, but I don't believe the thieves were ever caught.

I worked at that golf store for the second half of my junior year, that summer, and all throughout my senior year until I graduated and had to get ready to head to Tallahassee for college.

Up next: college jobs

Where were you when....

Having grown up in central Florida in the early 1980's, as the space program was really (literally) taking off, I have vivid memories of watching many many space shuttle launches from the schoolyard of Dr. Phillips Elementary School. I even remember while in first grade the songwriting contest our school participated in, to commemorate the launch of the first Columbia space shuttle. Being only an hour from Cape Canaveral (at the time known as Cape Kennedy, though Canaveral crept back into regular use by the late 80's), we could see the bright burning arc in the sky as the shuttle roared through the atmosphere, dropped its fuel tank and boosters after liftoff, and finally made its way out of sight and into orbit. As small children this was a thrill, and our teachers took us outside to watch every launch.

So it was on January 28, 1985, when I was nine years old and in the fifth grade. Fifth grade was a strikingly memorable and somewhat difficult year for me, because my teacher Mr. LaFountaine enjoyed singing the Starship song "Sara" whenever I raised my hand in class. (This occurred less and less often in direct proportion to how often he sang the song, which to this day I still detest with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.) It was the year I was robbed of the 5th grade spelling bee championship because the teacher who read the words pronounced diagnosis as diagnose, and when I correctly spelled diagnose and then pointed out her error and argued I should not be eliminated, she was embarrassed but refused to undo her mistake. Later that year, my entire class would learn the Super Bowl Shuffle and practice it during recess. Fifth grade was a memorable year in so many ways. But, out of all the memories I have of that year, the one that stands out most vividly is January 28, 1985.

Having watched a couple dozen launches of space shuttles by the time I was 10, I and most of my classmates knew what to expect. This launch was a little different, because for the first time a teacher would be on board. We had learned much about the research Christa McAuliffe would be participating in, as part of a national educational program centered around this mission. We had teachers who had applied to be the ones to go up in the shuttle, and one who had been interviewed and made it somewhat far in the process. It was something we and our teachers had been looking forward to.

So, on that very cold January day (it was unseasonably cold for Florida, and perfectly clear) we all bundled up and trudged outside expecting a routine launch. We stood, our little heads craned back watching the sky, waiting for the precise moment when that arc would lift off. And we saw it, but it was different. There was a puff, and then two small streams of white in either direction. We did not see the booster trails that normally fell off as the shuttle rose higher and higher. We only saw the puff, and the split. And even at 10 years old, we knew something was wrong.

We walked back inside, and I distinctly remember students asking why it was different this time. Our teacher tried to tell us that the two trails had been the boosters breaking off as normally would occur. We didn't believe him, and it was obvious fairly quickly that he wasn't really sure himself. Within ten minutes, word came to the teachers that something terrible had, in fact, happened. A TV was rolled into our area on one of those tall carts, and turned on. For some reason, I only have two images in my head of the TV coverage that day--Tom Brokaw's face, and the final moment of video footage that zoomed in closer on the shuttle, and was a bit grainier, just before it exploded. We watched that clip of the explosion so many times that day, over and over again that I could paint it from memory right now if I had to. The concept of 24 hour news coverage of a major event was a relatively recent development at that time, and the Challenger explosion must have been one of the first incidents that was truly covered round the clock by the network television stations. They had so little information to go on, all they could do was play that clip over and over and over.



"Obviously a major malfunction." Those chilling words after a lengthy silence, as everyone figured out that the worst had happened. We knew it right away, as children often do when we have no need for being cautious and careful before sounding the alarm. We didn't really understand yet that everyone on board was dead, that it was a tragic disaster that would set the space program back years as they investigated the cause of the accident and worked to prevent future occurrences. We just knew it hadn't looked like all the other ones, and that something bad had happened. Then we watched that clip over and over as the anchors struggled to figure out what it all meant.

People always talk about the seminal moments in our lives when everyone remembers where they were. 9/11 is the obvious choice in my lifetime and in the lifetime of most of the people I know. The assassination of President Kennedy was the seminal moment of my parents' generation. But before 9/11 happened, the one moment I remembered clear as a bell was the day the Challenger blew up.

Earlier today, people on Twitter started talking about where they were 23 years ago today. Some things just can't be described in 140 characters, so here is my story.

Hand in hand

Vandals spray-painted racist and anti-Obama messages on dozens of cars in Orlando over the weekend.

In addition to the racist drivel and anti-Obama stuff, they also found time to throw in "How 'bout them Gators."

Police are on the lookout for suspects wearing jean shorts.

Welcome to the water panic, central FL

Apparently folks in Orange County, FL (Orlando and its environs) are nearing panic mode because the county mayor indicated that absent serious restrictions on water usage the county aquifer will not be able to keep up with current demand for much longer. Oakland, FL is considering a proposed 100 gallon per person daily limit on water, prompting area residents to freak out. 100 gallons isn't a small daily allowance, though. In comparison, I tracked my daily usage over the last 3 water bills and I use on average about 40 gallons a day. I take a shower every day, brush my teeth and flush the toilet a few times, cook occasionally, and do 2 loads of laundry every 3 weeks or so. Even if you allow for a family with many small children and thus more water for cooking, bathing and laundry, the 100 gallon per person limit is not that onerous.

The people this would really affect are those with swimming pools and extensive agriculture. Oakland is near Apopka, a city known for its farming and nurseries. But since Apopka has relied on agricultural business for decades, you'd think the town would have taken steps to ensure that they have enough water to continue to support that industry. However, these are the same folks who allowed Lake Apopka to become so polluted by fertilizer that all animal and plant life in the lake were nearly choked to death, so I don't know why I'm surprised.

Considering that towns all over the south have been dealing with drought and the effect of over-development on dwindling water supplies, I just have to wonder why we all seem to have been so freaking stupid about putting the sustainable in sustainable development? Is it really just a mindset of build it now, worry about the consequences later? Did we learn nothing from the environmental disasters of the last century?

At any rate, now that FL is dealing with its own water woes you'd hope they would be more understanding about Georgia's as the two states argue over who should get more of the flow from Lake Lanier. But interestingly, they refuse to budge and we refuse to get real about other solutions. (I'm not counting forcibly taking over a few miles of riverfront Tennessee as a "real solution.")

It's all like a big game of chicken among the mentally retarded. There is no way the battle to out-stupid each other is going to end well.

Bad Form, FL State Attorney's Office

I just got the most bizarre letter. I apparently bounced a check at the grocery store back in college...IN 1996...and the Florida State Attorney's office informs me that I can pay them the amount of the check (about $100) and their $30 fee, or I can go to jail for up to 5 years. That is basically the gist of their letter. I had no idea about this bounced check previous to receiving this letter, and if they didn't have a copy of the check I would not have even believed it to be true. But still...this is what the State Attorney's Office of Florida is wasting their time on? Trying to collect an 11 year old bad debt for $100?

I was inspired to do a little research by what WASN'T in this letter. Nowhere does the helpful Assistant State Attorney mention to me that the statute of limitations in FL for passing worthless checks is 2 years. Nowhere does he concede that this means the SoL in my "case" expired more than 9 years ago. No, I was simply told that I can either pay the money or go directly to jail.

Now, because it's not much money, I'm going to do the right thing and pay it. But I am presently under no legal obligation to do so. As you might imagine, the letter that is enclosing my payment is going to be colorful, to say the least.

I just wonder about other people who might get letters like this and not think to ask about or research the applicable statute of limitations. Is this just a money-making scheme for the State Attorney, digging through their old files and finding unpaid bounced checks that they can harass people for? Is this an appropriate use of the time of a state attorney's office? There was nothing preventing Publix from coming after me for this check themselves anytime over the last 11 years, and since they are the ones I owe I expect they have a more vested interest in getting their $100 than the State Attorney does in getting their $30 in fees.

This shady behavior by a prosecutor reminds me of when a friend received a "subpoena" to testify in a criminal trial, just through regular mail but on a printed form that indicated failure to call the DA back and acknowledge the subpoena would be grounds for being held in criminal contempt. The GA statutes on service of subpoenas are very clear that to perfect service, the subpoena must either be served in person or via certified mail. The DA was relying on laypersons' ignorance of the requirements to perfect service and a healthy dose of fearmongering to get them to voluntarily appear for trial. Even though I insisted to her that she had not been properly served under the clear requirements of the statute, this friend was afraid to not appear at the trial because of the large print bolded threats of criminal prosecution contained on the "subpoena."

It's little things like this that make me worry just how often the government abuses their power. On Saturday we had a discussion about the death penalty with one of those "hang 'em from the nearest tree" types who insisted that executions should happen often and quickly where it was "obvious" that the perpetrator had committed the murder. We discussed how hard it is to call almost any crime obvious absent videotaped evidence that they committed the murder. We also talked about how many cases that have resulted in overturned convictions through the Innocence Project and otherwise happened because the prosecution forgot or otherwise failed to turn over critical exculpatory evidence that had been in their files all along. We also talked about how they have all the resources and advantages in the world, while defendants often have little to no resources and cannot utilize exculpatory evidence that they don't know even exists. I won't say we turned the hang 'em high guy's mind around on the issue, but we certainly made him think a little bit.

Obviously this is not on the same level, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from all this. Should a state attorney be writing misleading letters attempting to collect fines on criminal charges that are long past the statute of limitations? Should they be playing on ignorance or fear to collect old debt? I don't deny that I owe the money, and that's why I'm going to pay it. But I dislike being threatened in such a misleading fashion by a government attorney who should know better and aspire to honesty and openness.

(Before anyone mentions it, the Florida Statute of Limitations on point does allow that the time may be extended while a defendant is out of state, but it cannot be extended for more than 3 years in this fashion. So, either way, the statute has still expired many moons before they sent me this letter.)

No place in a courtroom

In response to the Democratic National Committee indicating it will strip the state of Florida of its delegates to the national convention if it holds its primary on Jan 29th as currently scheduled, U.S. Rep Alcee Hastings and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson filed suit against the DNC. Today, that suit was dismissed on summary judgment and the judge smartly ruled that the DNC may set its primary schedule as it so chooses and has the right to punish states that ignore its decisions. However, the judge indicated that the Senator and Congressman may re-file their suit under the Voting Rights Act if they so choose.

Hopefully this result will cause Florida and Michigan to stop acting like asses and put their primaries on dates in February or March like the DNC is asking. I simply don't understand why big states like this would feel the need to seek an early primary date in the hope of getting political attention. The whole reason that Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada traditionally get early primary dates is because they are small states will few delegates that are valuable simply because they are seen as early individual sample sizes of national voters, whereas large states like Florida or Michigan have power simply by virtue of having so many damned delegates to award. Perhaps if the campaigns would stop focusing on reinforcing the notion of inevitability of the nomination of whoever wins the early states and would instead seek to spread out the primary calendar and really try to reach lots of voters in lots of big AND small states, early and late, we wouldn't be in this predicament. It wasn't that long ago that Bill Clinton was presumed to be DOA when he performed awfully in Iowa and showed a small resurgence as an also-ran in New Hampshire...and yet we know he eventually won the nomination by a comfortable margin. So, just because the last two primaries have been wrapped up early in a snowball effect simply does not mean that it HAS to be this way.

I think the view that only by being an early primary state can a state feel the advantages of the attention of the candidates is woefully short-sighted. Florida, stop being boneheaded and move your primary date. Oh, and stop being assholes about your stupid ass bivalves and let us have more water for awhile too, while you're in a reasonable mood.

Mondo condos

Atlanta is, as I have been predicting for awhile now, in the midst of a massive condo glut. Over 3,000 units are under construction, while thousands more have already been completed but not yet sold. Then there are the thousands more still that some poor sap has owned for a few years but can't sell because nobody wants to buy a used condo when they can get a brand new one custom outfitted to their specifications for just a few thousand dollars more. Local realtors are calling it a crisis, and yet the developers just keep on breaking ground, building, and littering the Buckhead landscape with ugly towers.

Miami began a condo glut like this a few years ago, and it has seriously hurt their real estate market and the entire state of Florida's economy. Why isn't Atlanta trying harder to promote responsible development? Sure, people are moving back into the city in droves, but they are by and large not choosing to movie into spires of glass and steel and instead are revitalizing old charming neighborhoods. What good does a swath of largely empty condo towers do anyone, particularly since I'm guessing those same developers would fight tooth and nail to avoid having their units classified as affordable housing that can be subsidizes for "undesirables."

Cities like Boston that have a legitimate housing shortage could benefit from these types of large scale projects, but Atlanta has not shown that it has the market to fill its existing condo units, let alone the ones on the way. We don't need the intense drain on the city's economy that thousands of empty condo units would create, but we're certainly going to get it. Perhaps if state or city officials had taken a more active role in shaping these kinds of development projects we would have approached the arrival of the condo craze much more responsibly.

Ah, to be a young idealistic college student again

The political idealists at the University of Florida must be in heaven. They finally have something real and concrete to protest, to experience those heady days of sit-ins and marches, making demands of the administration, and all while the eyes of the US media rest upon them. Yesterday, in response to the tasering of UF student Andrew Meyer, students held a sit-in which doubled as an organizing meeting at which they demanded a meeting with the university president but settled for one with a lackey, then marched on university police HQ, then issued a list of three "demands" to the university police: 1) that all charges against Meyer be dropped, 2) that the officer who tasered Meyer be charged, and 3) that the university ban use of tasers on campus.

People who had been yearning deep down inside for a chance to play political organizer and rabble-rouser like back in the heady 60s and 70s that they've always heard about finally got their chance, and boy did they take it. And the collective media seem, through everso vaguely tongue-in-cheek coverage of the whole affair, to be recognizing it for what it is: an excuse for these students to go through a rite of passage, their first political organizing event.

As with all such events, there were the "Hey Hey Ho Ho" chants and "No justice, no peace" chants. It all brings a nostalgic tear to my now cynical eye. Have these protestors really examined the details of the situation, the many videos and stories out there, or do they just really want and need something to rally around?

Don't f*ck with Florida

Despite my earlier mockery of my home state, I still am smart enough to recognize its political and electoral importance in any presidential election. I am, apparently, smarter than Fred Thompson. For today, Fred Thompson virtually wrote off any chance at all of carrying Florida if he is the party's nominee by stating that he supports not only drilling for oil and gas off of the Florida gulf coast, but also drilling in the Everglades.

To those who have never visited Florida or don't understand what's so great about it or its damned bodies of water, let me explain it very succinctly. Florida has no income tax and a relatively low state sales tax. It has a relatively low overall tax burden on residents because it makes most of its revenue from the state's primary industry: tourism. In addition to that park with the mouse that Orlando is known for, the rest of Florida's tourist destinations are all beaches or swampy airboat tours through the 'glades. If you fuck with Florida's tourist destinations, say by putting big ugly pollutey oil rigs in or near them, you fuck with Florida. And you don't want to fuck with Florida if you have any desire to ever be President.

Fred Thompson made his boneheaded off-the-cuff remarks about all the places he'd drill during a meeting with Florida governor Charlie Crist, who has done a remarkable job during his last 9 months in office of not screwing anything up or pissing anyone off. In continuing that trend, after the comments by Thompson, Crist was apparently asked in a phone call if he agreed with Thompson's drill-happiness. Crist responded:

"I wasn't completely overjoyed with the positions ... but I think he'll take some time to respond to them."

(Back pedal, back pedal! Distance thyself!)

In other words, shortly someone needs to clue Fred in to the fact that if he doesn't repudiate everything he just said and basically loudly and repeatedly state "DRILLING IN FLORIDA IS BAAAAD," he's toast.

Maybe you don't mess with Texas, but you certainly don't fuck with Florida. Or its beaches or swamps. IDIOT.

Legal scraps and snips

None of these are enough for their own post, but together they constitute the random shit a lawyer thinks about in a day...or not.

* Bet you thought I'd have blogged by now about that guy who sued God, huh? What a complete idiot. Proving a point about frivolous lawsuits by filing one of your own might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

* So does everyone who went through the traditional big firm fall recruiting process think this is as bad of an idea as I do? If I'm deciding what firm I want to work for over the summer after my 2L year, I'm thinking that a weekend getaway in the wilderness sounds like a potentially scary waste of time. But hey, if a firm wants to waste that much time and money on recruiting a bunch of law students who don't know shit yet and may not even come work there, more power to them. I understand to some extent a summer associate retreat, but this is for people who just have callbacks in the race to be summer associates. Way to blow your wad early, guys!

* And on the creepy side of things, I just love how the AUSA (from Florida, of course...they need to change their state motto to "We Bring the Crazy!") assures the woman who he thinks is loaning him her 5 year old daughter for sex that he'll be "gentle and loving" and not at all physically, let alone psychologically, injurious to the small child he is seeking to rape. Way to go DOJ, you fire the people with some remaining principles, but are always sure to keep the perverts and pedos! I guess at this point I should just be glad he probably has a law degree.

* In yet more crazy Florida, now with more Gator assholishness, some guy got tasered blah blah. I find it hard to muster much caring or righteous indignation in either direction, but I do think the tasering seemed unnecessary to secure or restrain the guy, from my view of the video. I mean how many idiot Gator cops does it take to restrain one unruly college student the old-fashioned way? It is almost a little amusing though to hear the guy say "don't taser me, bro!" just before the zapping and the wailing.

Meanwhile, what I really want to know is: how much does Greg Palast love everyone who watches this video hearing him called the best investigative journalist in America? And was there ever really any doubt that Kerry had read (probably repeatedly) a book that claimed he actually won in 2004?

* Today marks a new first. Last night into the wee hours I redlined the ever-loving crap out of a document drafted by a client. I have a tendency to edit mercilessly anything that I am given to review, even if not asked to actually make sure that there is no passive voice and that abundance sounds better than plethora. I probably should have warned this person in advance, or used some sort of discretion in whether I wanted to piss off a client by giving them something bathed in red, but I didn't. And I got a phone call thanking me effusively for not being afraid to do just that and for making it read so much better, etc. etc. I never thought I'd see the day when I was thanked for grammatically eviscerating someone, but it appears he liked it.

He clearly learned nothing from George Michael

Given the ease with which you can find no strings attached sex these days via Craigslist and other places on the internet, it's a wonder that anyone is still dumb enough to try the old "I'll give ya $20 to blow me" trick in a public restroom. But Bob Allen, a Republican state legislator in my old stomping grounds of Orlando, FL is even dumber--he hung around a rest area and offered to give an undercover cop a blowjob for the bargain basement price of $20.

Check him out--wouldn't you let him blow you for just $20?

These Republicans and their hypocrisy just make me so angry, as they play the anti-gay religious conservative family values card while they're either up to their eyeballs in hookers, talking dirty to teenagers, or trolling for a little hot cop rest area sex. No, I'm not pretending that Democrats haven't had their own share of sex scandals but then they're not the ones running around screaming about the gay menace, now are they?

In a horrible way, Allen's pretty lucky that everyone in Orlando is preoccupied with the plane crash into some houses in Sanford that killed a bunch of people. That's going to seriously dampen the scandal impact of this story. But I'm guessing Allen is going to decide to step down from the state legislature and spend a little more time with his family any day now.