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Tuesday, June 17, 2014

There really is no end to the petty oppressiveness of this project

So many things the firms on the project are doing that are specifically designed to make temp lives miserable, I haven't even been able to catch up. Lot's more coming, believe me. Today, though, it got personal. I had managed to snag a great seat -- arguably the best seat in the house. See Rule No. 7. I was at the end of a row against the wall, next to a window, with a wall behind me. No sneaking up on me, totally out of the way of roving associates and staff attorneys. The perfect seat.

They fucking moved me. They took me from the best seat in the house and moved me to one of the worst. Why? Because they're dicks. But also because they put me on the privilege team. I am now reviewing documents for privilege, which is a high risk-low reward proposition. They want you to have expertise in privilege, but they don't pay you any more money. And getting a call wrong and letting go a document the firm thinks is privileged will get you fired. Nobody fucking cares if you let a nonresponsive document go on responsiveness review. It just doesn't matter. So my pay stays the same, but my exposure to termination goes way up. Theoretically, the priv team will be on the job longer, but that rarely pans out.

So they moved me into the "priv room" because they want all the priv reviewers together for whatever fucking reason. Now I am in the middle of a row, facing a wall -- the entire room is behind me and Helen Fucking Keller could sneak up on me -- everybody and their fucking uncle runs into my chair as the go down the too-narrow aisle, and my computer sucks. Add to that, the mouth-breather to my left is dumber than a box of rocks, based on empirical evidence, and the "rain attenuation" questioner from the orientation session is just to her left. I can feel my IQ draining away just because of proximity. And to my right is a balding fuck known as Stinky Joe who shaves his remaining hair, except for the hair that grows in the crease of the fat fold on the back of his head. It looks like a fucking mouse is hiding in his fat fold. Yes, I am multi-eff-bomb angry about it. And all for no reason. There is no reason at all that I can't review priv documents pretty much anywhere.

And if they had asked me whether I wanted to do priv? I'd have turned them down. It's not an "honor," the risk is higher and the pay isn't. And you are now, by definition, no longer off the radar, which is all I ask of a project. Let me do my job unnoticed and go home. All that is out the window, and I am mightily pissed.

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