Mischief not managed

My daughter was shooting rubber bands around the house, which reminded me of my fun summer in 1979. I had been accepted at the oh-so-prestigious Wharton School in the spring and was pretty much just killing time until September. I was no longer working at the regular job I'd had for the past year and a half, so first I went on a cross-country trip and when I got back I started working at copy shop (like a Kinkos) around the corner from my apartment on 2nd Avenue and 83rd St. This was only a part-time job, so I looked around for something else, and answered an ad in the paper for a place called Aspen Systems.

At that time, there was only one phone company, and its monopoly was being broken up by a series of lawsuits, among other things. Part of the process involved uncovering evidence of anticompetitive behavior. The would-be phone companies successfully subpoenaed all relevant documents from Bell and vice versa, and both sides reacted the way any rational company would; by sending every single document they could photocopy, relevant or not. Enter Apsen Systems.

I don't remember which side Aspen was working for, but they had 3 floors of a half city block-sized building, On my floor, there were no offices or even cubicles, just a sea of desks as far you could see, in one huge room with a high ceiling. They filled these desks 24 hours a day with people with 2 or more years of college, sorting through documents, looking for anticompetitive language. I was on the swing shift, 4PM to midnight.

Since none of us knew enough to actually analyze, we were given a list of keywords that might relate to the lawsuits, "competitor," or any other word with "compet" as a root, and so on. We were to note these on the sheet that came with each numbered document. We were given a pile of 100 pages of documents held together with a large rubber band to code, and when we finished we were given another pile. They were then shipped off to another department that checked our work and if we'd done it correctly we never saw them again.

About 3 weeks into this job, I found out that we had a quota of 180 pages per shift. By this time, it was taking me about 2 hours to do double that. There was no point in doing much more. Being too productive meant they'd make you a checker, which was harder and paid the same. So I had to do something, so I settled on mischief.

Propriety prevents me from going through all of the mischief, but let's just say that I behaved in a less than mature manner, and nobody ever asked me what was in my thermos bottle. My favorite activity involved the rubber bands. These were beauties, 6 inches long before you stretched them and thick enough to not break even extending them an arm's length.

You have to imagine what this place looked like- a square probably 150 feet on each side, filled with nothing but rows of desks. My best friend there sat 5 desks in front of me, so I couldn't nail him with a rubber band without endangering the people in between. So what I learned to do was fire the rubber band at the ceiling, where it would hit and then drop straight down. Within a few days, I could drop a rubber band on the desk of every person in my coding group. This was doubly enjoyable because it was a display of skill while being disruptive with the bonus of not injuring anyone.

How did they discipline me for this behavior? They offered me a promotion, which I refused, of course.