Jobs I've Had Part IX: Law School Jobs

During law school, I worked for two different small plaintiffs' firms in my second and then third year. The first was a job I acquired midway through the first semester of my second year, when I decided that I really needed some extra money because Boston was so damned expensive. I worked for a two man firm that did a little of everything, though personal injury was sort of the filler in between the cracks of their other cases. I worked 20 hours per week answering phones, drafting legal documents, doing legal research, and basically helping them out on whatever they needed done.

I remember working on documents for the arbitration of a post-divorce case all about stock options. The former husband had been quite high up at a technology company and had acquired millions of dollars' worth of stock options, and a portion of those options had been granted to the former wife in their divorce settlement, with the catch that she only obtained the rights to the stock options once they'd been both vested and exercised. The ex-wife claimed that the ex-husband had been deliberately NOT exercising his options in order to keep them from her. The ex-husband claimed that as a company executive his ability to exercise options was restricted for much of the year due to blackout provisions for stock transactions on company executives who might have foreknowledge of information that could affect stock prices. We represented the ex-husband in the case. I worked there for nearly 6 months and the arbitration still wasn't even completely over by the time I left, so you can imagine I came away from it with a dim view of how well arbitration provides a faster, less expensive alternative to traditional litigation.

One of the two lawyers was also in-house counsel part-time for a technology company, and that company had a patent litigation action that involved most of the other big firms in the city. I don't remember many details, beyond feeling like the poor guy representing them was a little outmatched given the firepower on all the other sides.

Another law student who actually looked enough like me that she could have been my sister shared my schedule there, and we occasionally overlapped enough that we could hang out and talk for a few minutes. I've long since forgotten how it came about, but one of us somehow discovered that we could search the cache of the computer at our desk and see what the 2 lawyers were viewing on the internet when we weren't around. We found URLS to beastiality sites in that computer, and were quite scandalized by trying to figure out who was responsible for it. I don't think we ever figured it out, though we had our suspicions. (One of the attorneys had a teenage son who occasionally came with him to the office on Saturdays.)

I left that job to serve as a summer associate at a big firm in Boston, which I would later join as a first year associate fresh out of law school. It was a cushy gig, since I was paid $1800 a week to do research projects, go to lunch with attorneys, go to cocktail parties and dinners all paid for by the firm, and even take a weekend trip sponsored by the firm to the Vermont mountains. Of course the firm was NOTHING like this when I returned as a real employee, but it was still lovely while it lasted. We had a big class of 30 law students from various schools, and there were several romances and scandals that summer. At the end of the summer I got an offer for full time employment, so I knew I could relax my third year of law school rather than sweating it through another interview process.

Third year I again needed to earn a bit of extra money, so I went to work part time for a solo practitioner. While I don't really want to put her name here because I'd prefer not to have her find this blog through a Google search, let's just say that her first name was the name of a famous main character from a Shakespeare play about star-crossed lovers, while her last name was the last name of the rival family. It was her married name, and she'd long since divorced Mr. M, but she kept the name because people found it distinctive. Also, she was crazy.

She had won a few huge cases in the years before I joined her practice, and I think she still fancied herself as a legal badass. The problem was that the money had started to wear a little thin, and the only cases that we had were not quite the moneymakers she hoped. I worked on a personal injury suit against a large Atlanta-based building supply chain (again, do the math) that really exposed me for the first time to the downfalls of dealing with plaintiffs. It's the reason I will never do that work again: plaintiffs lie, and they're almost all crazy.

I also worked on my first employment litigation case at that firm, a woman who had worked for a large banking organization and had been demoted after refusing her boss's sexual advances. It was a great case for us for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which was that the woman had kept copies of all sorts of emails from the boss saying how qualified she was for this new job, as well as a diary of all the things he tried to get into her pants. Ultimately we settled that case for nearly two years' pay, which is about as good as a sexual harassment case can turn out. (It had some warts, too, but we managed to keep those under wraps.) I had essentially been allowed to bring in and run that case entirely on my own, so I was very proud to get that result.

The lawyer I worked for was constantly trying to expand her repertoire, but sometimes before she really knew enough to take on a new type of work. She was called by a former personal injury client who has arrested for bank robbery, and decided that she could learn how to do criminal defense work. I recall frantically trying to research what I needed to put into a motion to suppress that she had decided we needed to file, and feeling stressed to the end of my rope out of fear that we were flying TOO blind in the case. Thankfully, that case was before a judge who was notoriously lenient on criminal defendants (to the point that she later was the subject of a campaign to kick her off the bench), and my boss managed to secure a deal for 6 months probation and a drug treatment program for the guy. I was amazed, because our client had signed a confession! (While high as a kite on Vicodin, but still...)

I worked there for the second half of my third year of law school, and while I studied for the bar exam. I left that office about a week before I started at my "real" firm, and when I left she asked if there was any way she could convince me to stay. Given what big firms were paying starting lawyers, I told her that I had to take the other deal. Honestly, she was such a strange bird--her depositions were excruciating to read because she liked to do weird things like stand on her chair to intimidate witnesses--that I really didn't think I could in good conscience keep working for her any longer.

However, I ended up being very happy she was still around and wanted me back 2 years later when I was laid off from that cushy firm gig. I worked for her part time for 6 months while I interviewed for full time positions at other firms, and strangely enough the same woman who had been the plaintiff in my first sexual harassment case had somehow managed to acquire a NEW sexual harassment case. I managed to settle that one too, though the terms were far less lucrative. By the time I left there a second time, the boss had started to talk about moving up to Vermont to retire, and it was clear her heart wasn't in it anymore. I ran into her in the courthouse a few years later and she was still working (and still crazy)...and told me a story about how she had an ethics complaint filed against her because she shoved opposing counsel at a hearing. She said this with pride.

Jobs I've Had Part VIII: "Attorney at LAW"

I did not work my first year of law school at BU, because it was generally prohibited. During my first year I was so focused on studying and preparing for exams that I did not submit resumes for any of the cushy big firm jobs that were available the summer after my first year. The applications were due just as mid-year exams were beginning, and the only information the firms would have to go on was our undergraduate experience. I figured a degree from FSU was unlikely to win me any interviews, so I did not bother to apply. Then I got shockingly managed to get straight A's my first semester, and kind of wished I had applied after all.

The rest of us who had not scored one of the plum summer associate gigs for our first year summer had to find something else to do. I wanted to stay in Boston, and needed my job to be paid. That ruled out internships for government agencies or judges. I sent resumes and letters begging for summer work out to virtually every small law firm that I could find, but all of my classmates were doing the same thing so competition was fierce. (At the suggestion of a friend of my father's I even sent a resume to a lawyer he knew at a firm where I would end up working 5 years later...a strange coincide.) I considered working as a legal secretary, since that would at least pay my rent for the summer, but then finally I saw an advertisement for a small litigation firm that was looking for a summer law clerk. I applied and was hired.

The firm was run by a diminutive man with a big attitude, and consisted primarily of personal injury litigation. I wrote briefs, answered discovery, and researched legal issues. I also wrote demand letters for injuries as silly as broken fingers and black eyes. It's pretty hard to trump up a black eye into $2000 worth of damages, which at the time was the Massachusetts threshhold for personal injury cases, but I found a way.

The most interesting case the office was handling at the time was the defense of a car dealership that had been sued by the EEOC because the owner was accused of same-sex sexual harassment. The depositions were hilarious and awful at the same time: at sales meetings, he would put his penis on the shoulder of certain salesmen not as a sexual advance, but for humiliation. The case was revolutionary at the time, because it was still unclear if a person could commit same-sex sexual harassment, particularly if there was no evidence that they were sexually attracted to the person they harassed. As we had discussed in law school, the law on sexual harassment is actually premised on discrimination law, meaning that such cases required proof of discriminatory treatment between male and female employees. It was an open question whether a harasser who was equally awful to both men and women was actually committing legally cognizable sexual harassment, because there was no discrimination in such a situation.

The attorney I worked for was like a caricature of the little man who is always over-compensating. He was about 5' 4", and at the time I was already 5' 11". He was always bellowing loudly and yelling into a Nextel phone, and he answered his office telephone with "Thomas J. Cox, Attorney at LAW." (Name changed to protect the not at all innocent.) He hated redheads for some reason I never really understood, and the other employees told me that he had even specifically requested not to get a redheaded baby when he and his wife had adopted a daughter.

He also hated me because he was frequently wrong in his understanding of a legal rule at issue in one of our cases, and when I would point this out to him and show him the correct rule, he would scream at me. For example, he had a client who had been sued in Michigan by a company that had leased him a credit card machine. The leasing contract specifically provided that any lawsuits arising out of the contract would be filed in Michigan, and the client had signed this contract. However, this attorney wanted me to draft an Answer to the Complaint for him to file in Michigan, even though he was not admitted there and had no local counsel. I told him that he would have to either have the client file the Answer pro se, or engage local counsel and get admitted pro hac vice. He insisted I was wrong, and that as our client's Massachusetts lawyer, he could file whatever he wanted anywhere he wanted. I insisted he would be risking ethical proceedings in Michigan, and thankfully I talked him into asking one of his friends at a big firm in Boston what he should do. The friend said the exact same thing I did, and then my boss didn't speak to me for a week. Apparently he didn't like that a first year law student had known the right answer when he did not.

He also was constantly either suing or threatening to sue a host of companies on his own behalf, including the EEOC because a chair had broken from underneath him during a deposition. He claimed this had left him severely injured, even though he only wore the neck brace at certain key moments. If he ate a bad candy bar or got sick after a meal at a restaurant, we'd whip up a claim letter to the company. If he bought a swingset for his daughter that rusted, another claim letter. The secretary and paralegal in the office one day showed me an entire drawer full of his various individual lawsuits and claims, and there must have been at least 50.

It was a shitty job, but it was legal experience for my resume. When the summer was over, I didn't try to stay on part-time for the next school year. I was ready to be done with the Attorney at LAW.

(The sexual harassment case eventually settled without a trial, but I never found out exactly how much the owner of the dealership paid.)

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