CLICK, CLICK

For the next eight hours I sat in my corner, my papers precariously hanging over the edge of the folding table and my hair soaked with sweat reviewing documents on the computer. There wasn’t much to it. Look at the document, determine if it was relevant to the criteria that we were given, click to make a decision then click to move to the next document and do it all over again. There were a couple of guys across the room having a conversation about online porn. They continued talking about websites, meeting prostitutes online and making their girlfriends watch the porn with them. Everyone around them shot sharp looks and hemmed and hawed, clearly indicating they didn’t want to hear the conversation but they just continued. Then a large woman chimed in from two tables away to inform us that she and her husband are swingers. Now we had to hear how she is gay and her husband is bi-sexual and they like to introduce each other to new partners. I couldn’t believe my ears.

Finally at about 8:00 pm, the paralegal and the associate came back both holding a stack of pizza boxes in front of them. They cleared a section of a table, put the boxes down and left. Before they were fully out of the room, people swarmed around the pizza boxes. It was as if they had never eaten before. Just the thought of the old bathroom guy touching pizza and then me following him made me nauseated. I watched my nemesis, the former stay-at-home mom stack three slices of pizza on her plate. She was clearly already two slices away from a heart attack and I bet her husband frequently reminded her of this. That was probably the source of her anger.

While most of the contract attorneys eagerly lined up for their pizza, I continued clicking the mouse, making relevancy calls and going from one page to the next. The case was an interesting one. A merger of the sort I would have worked on at my old firm. I’m pretty sure I read about it on the cover of the Financial Times a few weeks before but here I was doing the dirty work. I hated that. I could imagine the associate upstairs in his plush office working in a comfortable air-conditioned environment with his attention on actual important work. He was probably doing research, preparing pleadings, planning meetings to deal with the important negotiations of the deal.

I thought about calling my old firm back again. I looked at my watch—two more hours and I would have satisfied my 12 hour requirement and I’d be free to go.