Chapter 52: Water Rights Meeting

Wednesday August 20, 2008, 10:29 AM to 6:00 PM

The Office

I was running late so I took the Crown Vic, that way I would not get any tickets for speeding or running stop signs and such.

I logged in at 10:29. Barnes noticed and sent a “Welcome back” email. Then mentioned that he was working on some manpower paperwork. “Are you still married?” he asked.

My answer was “same as when I left.”

Li’s car was in the parking lot, looking sharp, like she washed it every day, but her shift ended at noon so I didn’t have time to see her naked, I had too much to get done first. Besides, after Cynthia I could not do Li justice.

I expected to find my inbox full of comments on my water brief for our afternoon meeting, but there was much less than expected and about half of the emails with questions and issues were followed by “never mind” emails when they went further into the reading. Looking at the time and date for most questions, my five readers had put in a long weekend plus a lot of long hours during my honeymoon.

Still, there were a few questions of substance, some tricky areas where maybe I assumed too much when I skimmed over some subtle points. Well, honestly, very few people do a good job of editing their own writing. I typed out a few paragraphs with adjustments and printed them out for the meeting.

There was also a light, entertaining note from Resha saying her jaw was sore after the weekend. It seems she recorded the busiest weekend of service calls in the firm’s short history because there were so many lawyers in the building working for so many hours on “something long, stressful and really mind-numbing.” Some were cursing my name, others were heaping praise, some doing both at the same time. But they all agreed that they wanted Resha doing the honors if she was free. Resha and several of the other service girls said they had never seen the lawyers acting “so like zombies” when they needed service. It wasn’t like they ignored the girls deliberately or were rude or anything, they simply “were not able to get out of their skulls, even when we women were naked, on our knees, making their cocks happy.”

I took it all as a compliment.

What was interesting was that Resha saw a number of lawyers and service girls she did not normally see - the weekend crew. Also, while the guys were zombies during the weekend, afterwards they went out of the way to be unusually appreciative of Resha and other girls who helped them when they really needed it. The highest praise was a kiss of the cheek, and Resha got several.

There was a system where, when especially good service work was brought to the attention of management, it resulted in monetary rewards for the girls. Resha set a record for the weekend, Barnes heard about it and sent a note-to-self email to himself, with a CC: to Resha, that her service had been much appreciated and would be rewarded at year end. This type of thing never happened.

The meeting in the afternoon went smooth. Joe was still bitchy, in full asshole mode, but when he started to argue about minor issues of sentence structure Barnes told him he was done for the day. The brief, updated with my last minute adjustments was approved for delivery to the client so the firm would get paid lots of money. Barnes was delighted and gave me more paperwork to fill out for a partnership, including the NDA and other forms for Abril.

I got my next assignment, since I was already at the office Barnes figured I might as well start on it. The issue was a commercial law section intersecting some transactions between state and federal banks. I figured it would take two weeks. Barnes figured the same, and he stressed that the completion should not interfere with the extended weekend social where so many folks were anxious to “dance” with Abril ... assuming I made partner by then. Knowing what he was thinking made feel dirty as I was reading the email.

Well, it was what we all expected.

There was one hitch in the logic, as a rule partners did not write reports like this, they supervised associates doing the writing. I had to be a partner for my scheme to work, but I was not interested in supervising associates or, even worse, meeting the clients who purchased our opinions. I made a note about this point for my next talk with Barnes.