Not waving but floating

Two major (and only) hearings have concluded for the department I work in and for the last few weeks I have had no work to do. Thus the secretarial co-ordinator thought it essential to have a float in to cover while she and another secretary were away on holiday - just in case I couldn't handle the complete lack of work by myself.

The girl from the float team pretended to work for about 20 minutes and then (probably after looking over at my screen and seeing a large crossword) gave up and is now stalking people on Facebook.

I thought about sending her links to all the hundreds of websites I visit daily to alleviate her uselessness, I mean, her boredom, but I don't think she'd appreciate them as much as me.....I've yet to meet another secretary who's made an art form out of surfing the net.

Who I would like to meet is another secretary who has found a way to get around the webmail firewall and access her yahoo account.

Timing is everything

Especially when the timing relates to minimising face-to-face time with fee earners - I've just returned from 2 weeks' leave and only had to put up with 3 days of interfacing with my boss before he left for a 2 week holiday. Still, he managed to call me a stupid cow in the brief yet all-too-agonisingly-long period of us having to share office space.

I never mind when I'm insulted by lawyers. Because the very fact that I don't give a shit what they call me means I'm still winning. The day I actually become upset and think about filing a grievance with HR is the day that this job has beaten me into a mindless and subservient paper shuffler with no life beyond her all-too-tidy desk.

In other news, people actually read this blog. Well, when I say 'people' I mean lawyers...it's a loose term. I referred to the secretarial co-ordinator as an Orc in my last post. The comment I received ran thus:

'Describe Orc...'

For those unfamiliar with the social politics of the legal world, here are some tips as to how I knew the above comment generated from the fingertips of a lawyer:

1. Nowhere in the sentence is there a please, thank-you or any other kind of vague attempt at courtesy.

2. When I say 'sentence' I mean 'words slapped together' with the utmost disrespect for any kind of grammatical context. If lawyers treated their clients the way they treated English Grammar, they wouldn't have any clients.

3. A sociopathic lack of empathy accompanied by a direct order for more information. Always a giveaway.

Anyway, lawdemon, one day I will describe the Orc. But seeing as I'm not on your payroll or anyway near it, I'll do it in my own time. Not that being on the payroll here makes me do the work any faster but I like keeping you in suspense.