Blast from the past.

Yesterday toward the end of conferences, one of the parents, perhaps noticing that I was making up multiple tests before they came in and seemed generally frazzled, jokingly asked if I wanted a drink. I think I replied yes, but that conference night was probably not the most appropriate venue. But it brought me back to one of the most ridiculous jobs I ever had.

In the spring of 1979, after I'd been admitted to Wharton and was living in New York with no plans between May and September, I got myself a job. It seemed perfect. They were looking for people with 2 or more years of college to work a 4:00 PM to midnight shift (the infamous swing shift) in an office doing clerical work. That was ideal because I could then spend my day at the beach and then go into work.

Here's what the job was. At that time, a series of court cases were underway which culminated in the breakup of monopoly of the Bell Telephone System, which was at that time, the only real telephone company (cell phones were still nearly 10 years in the future). As with many lawsuits, this one involved a process called "discovery." For those unfortunate souls who have never watched the movie, "My Cousin Vinnie," discovery is when the opposing sides in a lawsuit share their relevant documents with each other. It's required by law.

So what companies do when given a request for discovery is one of two things. Either they cheat, and try to conceal things, which is illegal, or they comply. And the one way to comply is to send every single document you can get your hands on and make the other side sort through them trying to find something useful (aka document dump). This was the path taken by the parties in these lawsuits. So what does a company do when faced with millions of sheets of paper that may or may not be relevant? One thing you can do is hire another company to hire a bunch of people cheap who can read to go through the documents and try to find something.

That's what happened here. We worked in the Bell System building, but it was taken over by another company with a bunch of people working for a couple of bucks above minimum wage. We sat at desks on an open room the size of half a city block and sifted through paper, looking for words that suggested that the company was acting in an uncompetitive way (that's what the lawsuit was about).

Each evening, we were given a box of numbered documents and coding sheets and we would read through them and note what pages the key words occurred on, if they occurred at all. Our quota for an evening's work was a minimum of 180 pages and a preferred amount of 225-250 pages.

I'm a fast reader, and was typically done within a couple of hours. And I was accurate, so my quality ratings were high. So what did I do with the rest of the time? Mostly, I wasted time and performed mischief. I walked around and distracted other people, even my supervisor. I became very adept at shooting the huge rubber bands that the documents came wrapped it. My best skill was to hit a spot on the ceiling (which as about 20 feet high) and have it then drop in the middle of someone else's desk. I’m still pretty decent at doing that.

Then one day, I decided it might be nice to bring something to drink to work with me, so I brought a thermos full of white wine. It honestly seemed a perfectly innocent thing at the time. I hadn’t had too many jobs and I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to bring alcoholic beverages to work with you. My previous boss had sat at his desk with a bottle of Guinness all day, starting at 10 in the morning.

I don’t know if anyone in authority ever realized that I was drinking 16 ounces of wine out of my thermos over the course of the evening. I certainly never made any effort to hide that I was doing it. I’m not sure they would have cared. On payday we would go and have what we called liquid dinner at a bar down the block. Nobody ever got in any trouble for any of this. A week before I was planning to quit they offered to promote me.

My best friend there was a nerdy guy named Marty who kept a Lucite picture frame cube thing with photos displayed on all sides on his desk. He told me that he had decided to keep the pictures that came with the frame, because the people in them were so much more attractive than his actual family.


I don’t know what the moral of this story is, or even what the point is. Except that maybe it’s worth not giving a crap about anything every once in a while and to just do what you feel like doing without worrying about consequences. I’m never really in a position to do that at this stage of my life. I hope that changes.