So I Have This New Job, See...

Playing in the background: "Disco Inferno" on Get Down Tonight: The Disco Explosion (PBS)

Hey, it's just on in the background, okay? I'm not watching.

I know my legion of screaming fans has been freaked out about my temporary disappearance from the blogosphere, even to the point of running screaming headlines in the Times of London and squawking peevishly at my wife about "Why hasn't she written anything lately?" but it's just the new job, folks. Having a new job is just so darn entertaining that I can't take two seconds to post anything. Well, not at work anyway (never a good idea). I like it and I think it's going to work out great but I'm A LITTLE OVERWHELMED RIGHT NOW, OKAY?! THANKEWVERYMUCH...

The Job takes place at a funky little two story building in Deep Ellum, home of some of the best music in Dallas and a bunch of abandoned storefronts, among other things. We're in the top story, though the lawyers own the whole building, and they're thinking of kicking their tenants on the bottom floor out at the end of their current leases because they think they're gonna need the space. To say that they're a little busy is an understatement. I walked in the door and they handed me a stack of problems. Not small problems either. Big, nasty problems with sharp pointy teeth. It's all personal injury and wrongful death cases. Luckily for me, people still crash cars into each other, even during a recession.

So I've been getting up at 5 in the frick'n morning so I have time to meditate before I head out to the pool for the Oh Dark Thirty Swim. I dunno why, but being there at 6 is somehow a much greater imposition than being there at seven even though it's just a matter of 60 minutes. But I do it, and I swim, and then I hit Starbucks and then I go to work. I'm usually there a little early, which is good because all manner of things are going on before I even sit down. The first day it took me three tries to print a letter. The second day I somehow managed to break the postage meter (everybody was very nice about it, though.) What I want to do is fast forward in time to about a month from now, where I have a grip on some things and know what's likely to erupt next. Unfortunately, it don't work that way. As Lars Van Trier is always saying, you have to take der good mit der evil. (Sorry, Lars, but that Danish accent of yours is just really out there.)

The firm, though, is just totally cool. Nobody has a standalone computer; we all have laptops and they're all networked with each other on a wireless. When we need to have a meeting, everybody grabs a laptop and heads for the conference room. So far nobody's said boo about me listening to the Internet radio, and my two bosses are gone so much that they've pretty much left me, the other paralegal, and the gang o'support staff to run the place.

I mean, I've been a case manager before but this is the first time I've actually called the shots. Friday I had a kind of epiphany. I kept bugging one of the partners on his Blackberry to approve something so I could send it out, and he told me it could go back Monday. After the obligatory "is he going to be mad at me if I point this out" thing I responded by telling him that, no, in fact it did have to go out today because we had a Rule 11 saying it had to go out today and there was a pending motion that was gonna land on our heads if it didn't go out today and, yeah, it had to go out today. There was, of course, the option to just hush, but all of a sudden I wasn't willing to do it. Kind of like Gene Kranz saying we weren't going to lose an astronaut on his watch. We weren't gonna get sanctioned on mine. So I did some digital arm twisting and it finally got approved. At 4:49.

But, ya know, I decided not to get upset about it. It was just my job, folks, and I was just gonna do it, and that was the end of the story. And, yeah, it's not technically in my job description to stop at the post office on the way home with a certified mail package, but I did it and it got done. And I did not get upset about it. Which, for me, was a revelation. Am I just old, crazy and fed up? Maybe. But sometimes that's the best kind of person to be.

So that's the big mystery. I hope by next week I'll be more on top of things, and this space will once more be filled with musings about Buddhism, butts, bodacious babes, and big bad bloggitude generally. We thank you for your patience.