At Morrison and Foerster, a big law firm where Steve worked, floating secretaries would be assigned to lawyers when their secretaries (as they were called before “personal assistants” became the term of choice) were away on vacation. The two secretaries Steven had during his career were very smart, highly competent, hard-wording professionals who played a big part in Steven being able to do his job. Not to cast aspersions on all of them, but a significant portion of floating secretaries were not. They became “floaters” precisely because they had no interest in actually working, and counted on the lawyers giving them as little to do as possible. The support staff managers knew which of the floaters were lousy but when the lawyers filled out evaluations after they had had one assigned to their desk, they would invariably mark “satisfactory” on all the categories. Lawyers generally didn’t like to get a bad rep with the secretaries, who when provoked (sometimes quite legitimately) could form an impressively hostile cabal, and the lawyer was unlikely to have to work with that floater again anyway.
Steve, however, couldn’t have cared less what others thought about him (or about being politically correct, for that matter), so he filled out the evaluations in his usual understated and tactful fashion. For one floater, Steven wrote: “This is the laziest person still holding down a job in the Northern hemisphere,” and had the following to say about another floater’s initiative: “If breathing were not an autonomic nervous response, this woman would suffocate.”
I found this out because the managers came to my office (I worked at the same law firm at the time), cracking up, to show me these evaluations. Unfortunately for Steve, this back-fired on him. Whenever his secretary was out, the supervisors would assign him only the worst floaters whom they wanted to get rid of but couldn’t without written evidence.
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