Copyright 1995(c)
                           Overworked
                        By Linda Reyhmond

     She worried.
     Her boss was on vacation and a pleading was due in one of his
big cases and she couldn't get hold of him -- he was out hunting.
     It was only one in the litany of things that had gone awry
lately. After six years in the single practitioner office, it
seemed abundantly clear to her that they were falling further and
further behind in both quality and amount of production. Despite
hiring another clerical assistant equal to her own performance
which was quite good, indeed, they seemed to send less and less and
get more and more. The great discovery of defense attorneys had
been that discovery pleadings, where the people being sued ask for
everything up to and including the dental records and first
birthday photos of the sue-or (plaintiff), so reams and reams of
paperwork deluged her daily.
     It was an insane situation and she was hooked into it. When
they dismissed a pseudo-receptionist at the front desk and he
installed her and her helpmate in the back, it meant sometimes
clients rang the bell, just as one was doing now. Sometimes they
merely walked in, and she had quit pressing him to install the
bell/lock on the front door he'd promised to have installed three
years before.  
     The boss never missed a vacation and she had trouble sleeping
at night. Finally, as he filtered more and more paralegal/legal
work down to her and her helpmate, she realized that he paid them
a handsome salary because he expected them to function as he would
in all but court appearances. Considering neither was qualified,
not to mention their lack of training for legal research and
decision at the practicing-attorney level, things backed up further.
     She developed a strange malady which caused a burning
sensation under her skin on waking in the mornings, and she began
to take the tranquilizers her doctor prescribed because she simply
could not otherwise cope. Up to two tranquilizers a day, she was
beginning to experience some of that sensation returning, and
wondered if she would indeed have to increase her dosage to three
in order to survive this place. A devotee of the old work ethic
nobody practiced anymore, where one gave a full day's work and then
some, it was almost impossible for her to accomplish anything in
a given day unless it was phone contact, book work or the
intermittent crisis the boss dictated over her shoulder during the
day. Daily keep-up work and usual practices which would save them
a great deal in the end run, invariably left her with a small pile
of accomplished work at the end of the day, and yet she'd been busy
every second... given 100 percent, plus. It was frustrating and
inclined to make one doubt one's own ability, even when one knew
it was excellent.
     The front bell - the type found at a service counter - rang
again. The problem was that there was a front door that locked, but
between the reception seating and the internal office the door had
no lock, no bell, no nothing except see-through glass. 
     And the boss just didn't seem to care. Didn't, that is, until
one of the myriad of things that had assumed crisis proportion
forced its way to his consciousness. Taking files in on referral,
he seldom bothered to even advise the name of the file so they came
into the office by some method of osmosis she could not discern
and stacked up on a library table until one day he came along and
asked if 'the motions had been filed in the whatsit case.'
     "Which case?" she would ask.
     "Wheeler [or whatever]," he would say, impatiently. The
problem was it was more and more often one of the ones she'd never
so much as brushed past and the motions had not been done because
after all, she didn't know any were due or expected, much less what
they should be. More often than not, his solution was to say
something like "look at the one we did in Brown" or the name of
whatever other old file he could recall a similar one had been
prepared for. He would then tell her to compare the Brown pleading
to the ones in this new, unknown Wheeler file, and file a similar
one specific to the Wheeler pleadings after the comparison with
Brown. When she looked in Brown, she found something totally non-
compatible with what he'd left her to understand he wanted, and
that was only half the problem.
     The other part was that not she, not her helpmate, not anyone
in the office aside from him had the time to make the comparison,
which required a hell of a lot more time than the typing and phone
answering, copying, courthouse running, scheduling and bookkeeping,
all of which already took up the whole day and more for the two of
them. When she tried to make him see that, he sloughed her off with
a wave of the hand.
     No way, she thought, could he know and obviously he did not
care how frustrating this was for a person like her -- somebody who
cared about quality and compliance and such. He missed every
deadline despite her urging and reminding, and then acted like it
was her fault. It was demeaning and demoralizing, but maybe it
would have been okay. She *was* taking the tranquilizers.
     At first, when she upped the dosage from one to two, she
noticed a slight slurring of her words on occasion but as her
tolerance increased, so her performance returned to its former
level. It's just that by then, it didn't seem it could all ever be
caught up and they expected to just keep on doing last-minute patch
jobs under fire. It made her crazy and the itching sensation
returned more often. Stress? God knew it could well be a result of
it since she was obviously under it.
     When she finally got out to go home in the evening, sometimes
as late as 7:00 p.m., she was no further toward catch-up than if
she'd stayed 7.5 hours, only, which is what she was supposed to be
working. Then, her house beckoned her and made demands that took
virtually all her free time. A nice home, like a responsible
performance, was important to her. She worked very hard to keep it
immaculate, maintain the lawn and the pool. It had never occurred
to her to stop and wonder if she was happy with choices because she
merely accepted those definitions foisted on her by society, and
never actually appreciated the ability to choose.
     To suggest to her that she might toss it all off and go be a
commune member would have been as foreign as to suggest she shave
her naturally-curly, carefully manicured hair which was dyed just
the right shade of dark brown so as to look completely natural.
     She sighed and rose to answer the bell. 
     Bobby Jack Higgins strolled in on Tuesday, seeking assistance
from the vacationing boss. She apologized that they did not do
criminal representation, and she directed him to the criminal
attorney down the hall. 
     The next day, he called her to ask for another referral.
     The day after that, he called to complain that everybody kept
telling him her boss was just the best and he needed a good
attorney and couldn't she please just...
     After a while she recognized his voice, and cut him off. By
Friday, he'd called her four times before lunch. At 1:30 p.m., he
showed up in her office again.
     She tried to get rid of him, but he was insistent. When she
threatened to call security, he said he wouldn't do that and took
a gun from his pocket. She thought of all the times she'd resented
going through the metal detecter at the courthouse. She thought
about all the people -- husband, children, even parents who would
benefit financially if he shot her and they sued the building, the
boss, and the world. Gee, what a way to bring it to the attention
of the powers that be that security was not quite sufficient unto
her particular office building.
     He droned on and on about how unfair life had been to him and
recited name after name of wrong-doers. It wasn't a new story for
an old personal injury secretary and by 4:15 she was ready for him
to either shoot or go, and said so.
     He leveled the gun at her. She thought about the piles of
files overflowing her desk and the stack in the library. She
thought of the cobwebs she'd noticed in the corner ceiling of her
kitchen that very morning. She thought of the additional librium
she'd taken just yesterday to quell the itching. She smiled,
thinking of the boss's frustration when he got no answer in his
desultory next phone call to the office. 
     He saw it as an invitation, and shot her between the eyes.
     Had she lived, she'd have been unable to say whether it had
been a mercy or a cruelty.
                               END