After being out Tuesday for snow, we came in Wednesday to find that two of the guys in our room had been loaded up --computers, personal items and everything -- and moved to another room on the project (the project occupies four interconnected rooms). Nothing left but empty tables. Turns out a person sitting next to the two guys had complained -- repeatedly -- about their talking, both amount and content. I can vouch that these two didn't talk any more than anybody, and as for offensive content, it would take them a week to match up to what I can do in 10 minutes. We had all assumed the "behave yourself" emails were aimed at me, but nobody received a personal talking-to, so we were just guessing.
After Monday afternoon, we needed to guess no more. An innocent encounter led to a major blowup when one of the guys who got moved performed a common courtesy for the rat and the rat reacted with a rude, nasty rejection of the offered courtesy. Things got worse from there.
It all makes me wonder about the nature of Temp Town. Just as there have been many changes in the legal community in recent years, so have there been many changes in Temp Town. But the more Temp Town changes, the more it stays the same.
When I first started in Temp Town several years ago, I think it would be safe to say that Temps were fairly easy to categorize. In fact, I had developed a list of eight characteristics of temps. If you had three or more of these characteristics, you were doomed to be a temp. Later, I amended the list to include, conditionally, a ninth characteristic. The ninth characteristic, lack of social skills, was late to the list because so many Big Law lawyers suffer from this and yet succeed in Big Law. Many of the lawyers who shoot for the legal big time -- and many who don't, for that matter -- are, quite frankly, assholes. The profession attracts them. Let's face it -- to be a successful lawyer in many, if not most, practice areas, you have to be extremely aggressive and unconcerned with hurting other people's feelings. Outside the legal profession, that makes you an asshole.
Temp Town shares a lot of characteristics with middle school. Backbiting, tattling, and backstabbing, all to make yourself look better, are commonplace. Floating out there among the unifying characteristics that I had identified were two more traits that were harder to nail down, but were -- and are -- nonetheless common in Temp Town: passive-aggressive complaining to authorities and flat-out batshit craziness. The two usually go together and often combine to get temps fired. These people have a bizarre, irrational set of requirements for an "acceptable" work environment and they attempt to impose these requirements on whatever project they are on. Basically, they're troublemakers, but in a strange twist, troublemakers rarely get fired in Temp Town; it is earier to appease them by getting rid of the object of their complaints. Let's face it, trouble-makers like that would sue if you fired them. So fire the other guy, instead. Fortunately, our passive-aggressive, batshit crazy temp failed to secure the firing of the people she complained about.
Also fortunately, these people are less common in Temp Town than they used to be, partly thanks to the fact that the problems in Big Law have resulted in more temps being accomplished attorneys with a past in Big Law who got caught by the shakeout of the last few years. Still, the whack jobs are with us, and we have at least one on our project, which means we got trouble:
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