PhilaLawyer.net - August 7, 2006

I've had to apologize for a lot of things in my life. I've been caught with other girls, wrecked my mother's car, lost sets of my father's golf clubs, forgotten anniversaries, birthdays, funerals, weddings and just about every RSVP deadline ever leveled on me. I've bought the wrong jewelry, bought the wrong tampons, forgot to make the hotel reservations and left the cat outside all night in 10 degree weather. I don't keep a Palm Pilot - I don't even keep a paper calendar. I never have and never will. I actually attempt to manage my deadlines and my personal life in my head, not a wise idea for one who floats through his days in a Walter Mitty-esque haze, daydreaming about anything but the tasks at hand. Some weeks I've used the apology, and its bastard half-brother, the fabricated excuse, more than I've used the toilet. But it wasn't until I started practicing law that I actually had to make a formal apology; in some instances, a written apology, to someone truly offended. Prior to law, I'd never met anyone who could be offended, or whom I'd given a shit about offending. I'd say I was sorry if I had to, but it was just words, and I spit them out like I were being interrogated - barely audible, forced, fake, facetious. What did I care? I didn't have a job to lose then. There was no apology worth an authentic-sounding performance. If you were a friend, you'd never be offended. If you weren't, you didn't count. That all changes when you get a job, when you have to play politics. Suddenly, you have to watch what you say. Being the dick in the tattered white UVA hat, stained khaki shorts, flip flops and torn madras shirt, commenting on the ass of every girl that passes between slugs of Natural Light, isn't cool anymore. You're a Suit now - cracking off sarcastically about how you're investing your bonus in a "tard porn" venture won't be met with a round of belly laughs. "They look so fucking hot in those uniforms" isn't a funny flip response to a middle aged partner's discussion of girl's field hockey... since his daughter's on the team. Offering a Beetlejuice quote - "I like abortion, it makes me horny" - during a discussion of Roe v. Wade won't be considered daring wit. But you can't change what you are. You'll go too far, and you'll piss somebody off. You'll have to apologize, and it'll be a queer gig. You won't mean a stitch of it, but for the first time, you'll have to act like you do.

Reply To All

Email kills. If risky office behaviors were drugs, writing mocking, salacious, biting, insulting or perverted emails about co-workers would be a speedball. It's a great inside joke (and actually creates more co-worker bonding, at least within the circle of email recipients, than any firm retreat), but if you make the slightest error in the delivery, if the target of the joke somehow comes into a copy of it, you're dead.

Hitting "Send" on an email is creating an immediate permanent record of your thoughts at the moment you clicked the mouse, a record you can never deny, never walk away from, never mitigate with the quick qualification you'd use in conversation. "Most middle aged office monkeys on Harleys look like tools... but its, uh, cool for people who are real knowledgeable about bikes, like, uh... you, Bob..." Your thoughts on the size of Janet in Accounting's ass, John's comical comb-over, Jordan's cheesy suit and Katie's grating Northeast Philly accent are forever memorialized in type. You can't run from them. You can't plead that they are being taken out of context. The entire exchange is there, for the offended to analyze, to become increasingly more furious about with each successive reading. All you can do when you've been caught writing something like, "Karen would be kind of hot if she didn't have that Jersey mall rat haircut and she lost some of that cottage cheese in her can," is sheepishly admit that, yes, those are your thoughts, and you're sorry the offended party accidentally read them. When Karen shows up in your office and demands an apology, you're left in the awkward position of saying you're sorry not for the substance of what you wrote, but that she happened to read it. For all but the comatose, "I wish you'd never seen it, Karen," translates to, "We'd have all continued laughing behind your back had Bill not accidentally sent the email to you."

You're stuck in a very tricky exchange. The offended stands before you, wearing the offending haircut, knowing you find it a source of comic ridicule, and demands satisfaction for her wounded honor. To say, "I didn't really mean you had a fat ass and a bad haircut," only digs the hole deeper, telling Karen you guess her dumb to boot. You meant what you wrote. It wasn't just an offhanded comment; you took the time to type it out. You even took the time to edit it and spell check the goddamned thing, to make it as crisp, nasty and universally understood as possible... to ensure somebody on the distribution list spit his coffee on his keyboard reading it. The email was better written than any of the briefs or letters you phone in every day. Karen even laughed when she first started reading about the "Jersey Claw" haircut... before she realized it was about hers.

There's also no, "I was just kidding," in email. Words on paper have no body language or inflection attached to them. They mean exactly what they say; nothing more, nothing less. You can't say, "Oh, come on... you knew I was kidding..." Anything spoken in jest or drunk is at least a half believed by the speaker. With email, whatever you've written is 100% your honest belief or opinion - a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. You can't distance yourself from your written words, but you also can't take the blunt, brutally honest approach:

"Well, I meant it. I know bull dykes with better hair and your ass looks like a garbage bag full of pudding astride stilts. I stand by my comments, and everyone agrees."

"Have you looked in the mirror, John? I could knit an AIDS quilt with that comb-over. Donald Trump would blush..."

"Its 'wah-tur,' not 'wood-uh,' Katie."

No, you have to at least pretend your comments aren't accurate or shared by everyone who got your email. That's the hardest part of apologizing for an email; the text is true, the "sorry" a festering pile of the treacliest horseshit.

My first formal work apology stemmed not from an email I wrote, but from an email written to me. When I first started practicing, email was not the universally utilized form of communication it is today. People were still leery about using it for formal business correspondence. It was mostly used as a distribution network for internal memoranda and messages between lawyers and staff regarding scheduling issues. Most of these were only a few lines long, they were only about 1/3 of the emails you received in any given day. The rest were personal - invitations to social engagements, jokes, pictures, movies or links to porn. Email was a wonderful instrument for staying in touch with friends and relocating those shots of Terri Welles' disco mitt you used to jack off to in 7th grade. The wonderful thing about email was that it also allowed you to appear diligent and hardworking. When "Eugene," a nasally litigation partner, appeared in your doorway while you were making a personal call, it was hard to feign the call was business related. You had to be an exceptionally talented actor to shift from full-on guffaws into a deep and deadly serious voice. "Yeh, so those fucking mushrooms were strrrronnnng... Harris got all fucked up and took out a chainsaw. I got this photo of him with it over his head, with his ballsack hanging out of his shorts... fucking hysterical shit... er, uh.... ahem, uh... Excellent. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. I'll amend the interrogatory responses immediately."

Those sudden conversation shifts could also confuse the hell out of your friends. One minute you're regaling Chuck, your Junior year roommate, with a story about a weekend hook up, then the next minute, with no warning, you're throwing strange words at him in a strange voice. "So then I've got her on the couch, and I'm squeezing... ahem... errr... I don't think those requests are proper under the federal rules. I'm checking the annotations right now. Be back to you shortly." As soon as Eugene finished blathering about some "pressing" deadline months away or some "fascinating" procedural quandary his client was in, you'd have to call Chuck back and explain yourself. This is assuming Chuck didn't call you back in the interim. I've been busted a few times because of a Chuck too stupid to take a hint. Nothing's worse than listening to a Eugene prattling on in the doorway and then hearing the phone ring, knowing it's Chuck calling you back, knowing your assistant is going to yell into the room "_______, do you want to take Chuck, your friend from college. He says you just hung up on him." Eugenes don't like feeling foolish. Dishonesty reminds them of rejection ("I can't go out with you, Eugene... uh, my, uh... aunt... from... Australia... is visiting that weekend"). Eugene will punish your deception by assigning you a laundry list of arcane issues to research. "I need you to find all of Delaware's exceptions to the parol evidence rule, and get it to me by tonight. Email it to my home if I'm gone when you complete it." He'll Make You Pay the way Nixon treated his Enemies List. But with email, this horrorshow never happens - there's never even a risk of it happening. All Eugene ever sees is a diligent associate, typing away, engrossed, enraptured, obsessed... all but diddling himself raw behind his desk over the endless riveting stream of mind-bending arguments and dicta pouring into his brain. Clack clack clack clack clack... there you are - partner material, banging away at your memo on ERISA pre-emption.

"Re: Friday Night.

So then I've got her on the couch, and I'm squeezing her tits, and she's just going nuts..."

My first month on the job coincided with one of my best friend's first few weeks on the job at a Wall Street investment bank. Having both successfully avoided work for several years by pursuing graduate degrees, neither of us knew what to expect in the work world. Gavin and I exchanged numerous daily emails about the people in our offices, the job duties and the work world social life. There were also the obligatory lists of offensive jokes and movies, all of which came from Gavin's end. Investment banks then, in the days before the "locker room" sex discrimination scandals, seemed to have a very loose policy regarding the exchange of digital filth. Many of the foulest emails I received from Gavin were sent to him by his superiors. This environment fit Gavin perfectly. Gavin was the sort of person on whom the "Stifler" character in the "American Pie" series is based. Most people assume that character is entirely fictional - they're wrong. There are thousands of Stiflers roaming colleges everywhere, and they don't change much when they enter the workforce. Hence, the wealthy sexual discrimination plaintiff's bar. Gavin was just rude in every conceivable regard. And utterly unrepentant. To this day, I'm still constantly deleting emails titled "scat" or "Anorexic Hotties." It isn't that Gavin has no filter; he just doesn't give a shit.

I was jealous that he'd found a career where he was allowed to act like we were still standing around a keg talking about tits. I'd somehow been detoured from Fraternity Row to the Audio-Visual Club. The only joke emails I'd received were utterly generic, lame, antiseptic G-rated Jay Lenoish dreck. I felt like I'd been transplanted into an episode of "Home Improvement." I think Kurt Cobain was overrated, but after a month or so of reading these horrible jokes, I understood the brilliance of his famous lyric "I wish I was like you, easily amused..." Anyone who's worked in a law firm and had to pretend to laugh at the stale material bandied about as comic relief can sympathize. You smile and force yourself to chortle, thinking "How can you possibly laugh at that? It's worse than a Sinbad movie. It makes Ed McMahon look brilliant." While Gavin was getting fantastic material, I was getting emails from the spinster librarian and geriatric appellate partners containing jokes with punch lines like "Then the cop said to the lawyer, 'You're arm is missing,' to which the lawyer replied, 'Oh no, my Rolex!'"

The fount of the lamest email jokes was the firm's "Mrs. Garrett." Every firm has one. She's either a librarian, head of associate development, or an ancient paralegal. She's been at the firm longer than any living named partners; an institution, a low rent Mr. Chips. Everyone loves her, or pretends to love her out of pity. The firm is her life. She truly looks forward to getting up every day and roaming its halls, beaming "Gooooood morning!" to everyone like Alice the housemarm in "The Brady Bunch." You never say anything negative in her presence because in her world, the firm is "The Paper Chase." She reveres lawyers, remaining in awe of what, in her layman's ignorance, is a romantic profession. She views the young associates as Atticus Finches in the making. She's painfully clueless, but no one dares tell her the sordid truth about what the firm is really like because they know that would destroy her, robbing her of her perceived morale boosting value. In Mrs. Garrett's world, the associates are hard working serious kids who need a little wholesome release from their apprenticeships. So she sends entire departments emails containing jokes and stories of the sort the author of "The Family Circus" might use were he to write a comic strip about lawyers. She's the sort of person who'd send you, with not a hint of sarcasm, that picture of a kitten dangling by its paws from a tree branch, with the quote "Just hang in there, baby," below it. In fact, she has it framed behind her desk.

On any given day, I might have three or four different email exchanges going at the same time. I'll bounce back and forth between threads about politics, music, movies, sports and gossip. Across the bottom of my screen will be several half completed minimized replies to various personal emails. Back when Gavin and I had both entered the workforce, we were novices with email. I'd occasionally open the wrong draft and type a work-related message into an email to Gavin, and vice versa. This tended to happen when you were scanning the Drudge Report and Uncle Scoopy's Fun House, calling friends to set up weekend plans, reading case blurbs, typing out research memoranda responding to partners. Considering that his schedule was twice as hectic as mine, and his work actually intellectually taxing, I was amazed Gavin could respond to my emails at all.

About a month into my job, I began lamenting to Gavin that the people I worked with weren't much fun. While he was working harder than I was, at least he had interesting co-workers. When Gavin wasn't at the office, he was chasing skirts, chomping X and blowing money at top shelf clubs and restaurants. I was trying to get laid in a bars full of cloying tanning booth addicts trawling for husbands and homes in Bryn Mawr. Gavin concluded that I was just doing my usual - whining. It couldn't be as terrible as I was making it out to be.

FROM: G_____@_____.com
RE: OFFICE

You're a fucking whiner. You just need to get laid.

TO: G_____@_____.com
RE: RE: OFFICE

Laid? I'm getting laid. I'll send you something from my girlfriend.

I quickly located an email containing a picture of a Shi Tzu dog in a judge's robe that Mrs. Garrett had sent my department earlier that day. I didn't just forward the email to Gavin. I slid his name onto the distribution list and "replied to all" on it with the comment "Excellent. Printing it for my refrigerator," a subtly sarcastic dig at the email I figured would make me look cool and subversive. Then I went to lunch.

When I returned from a horrible lunch at the Dock Street, I had a bunch of new emails in my in box. A few were marked "High Importance." This was disturbing, as I had never before seen any email marked "Urgent". Each one, some of which were written in exclusively capital letters, was a variation of one of three messages:

"Who is G________ N________?"

"Why is this G_____@______.com on internal firm mail?"

"DISGUSTING."

As I read the messages, all I could here in my head was my fourth grade teacher telling my mom at that first parent-teacher conference, "________ is bright, but he seems to gravitate toward negative elements. His circle of friends will bring him down."

I scanned one of the emails until I got to the bottom of the thread, where Gavin's response to my email was located. The dumb bastard had replied to all. My heart sank as I read it:

RE: RE: Shi Tzu

Hysterical. A Shi Tzu in a robe. What will they do next???? Ever see Shi Tzu porn? Great dogs for fucking. You just lube them up, pop them on and spin the fuckers. It also works with Bichon Frises and Chihuahuas, but they crack too easily. The Shi Tzu is durable. It's the Checker Cab of canine sexual partners. I've moved on to Labs, myself. I'm sexually selfish, and they give killer blow jobs. Most breeders won't tell you this, but it's a fact. You just get some peanut butter and you rub it on your...

I didn't bother calling Gavin. I figured the firm would probably track him down and send a threatening letter to his employer. But what would they do with me? I didn't write the thing, but they could see from the thread that I'd set the process in motion by putting Gavin on the distribution list. Could I pretend I didn't know him? No. They'd catch me in that lie. I had to bite the bullet. I had to apologize to Mrs. Garrett, then explain myself to my coworkers. I had to fess up. "Yes, I consort with people who think dog screwing is terrific subject for witty anecdotes." I had to address the concept of fucking a yip-yip dog with a straight face. I couldn't wince. I couldn't smirk. I had to prove that I was not like Gavin, even though a cursory scan of my emails in the firm's server would reveal that we were nearly identical breeds of tattered-hat assholes. I was doomed. This was like being caught masturbating by my mother. I had nothing to say, no defense...

"Bestiality? How do you explain yourself?"

"It's, uh... just a goof."

"A 'goof'? Joking about the sexual abuse of animals?"

"Who said anything about abusing them?"

There was no way I'd get through such a meeting. I'd never contain my laughter. I knew I had to get it out now, and quickly. I closed my door and read Gavin's email about fifteen times, until I mentally exhausted every funny mental picture involving fucking a Shit-Tzu or a having a Chocolate Lab lick peanut butter from your balls. I then composed myself, opened the door, wiped off the grin and set about the impossible task of apologizing to Mrs. Garrett.

I walked down to Mrs. Garrett's office. "She's gone, not here" a dumpy anonymous woman in the office next door chirped. Oh, for fuck's sake... she did not go home sick. Like this is the first time in her 65 plus years she's heard someone talk about fucking a dog? It's not an earth shattering concept. Definitely not enough to make someone physically ill. Or is it? Is it possible she had a Shi Tzu? Did I dredge up some horrible memories of her Shi Tzu being buggered by some neighborhood degenerate?

Wild images ricocheted around my head. I saw Mrs. Garrett in her bathrobe, rollers in her hair, in her backyard, screaming and battling to grab her Shi Tzu from the clutches of a long haired, beared beastialist, the stereotypical scrawny, Manson-like fiend from a mid-70s public school warning short about acid, mounting the howling dog on his engorged member. "Put my Fluffy down! Put my Fluffy down!!!!"

Or maybe it was Gavin's comment about Labs that got her. Maybe she came home early one afternoon and found that ne'er do well son of hers, the one who was heavy into the pep pills and quaaludes, with the Gregg Allman haircut, standing in the pantry, slapping a butter knife's worth of Jif onto his manhood and whistling for Goldie to "come and get it." Some drugs were a lot stronger back in the 70s...

"What's so funny?" the dumpy woman intoned.

"Nothing, nothing."

Barbara, a partner involved in associate development, was waiting in my office when I came back. Tell them Gavin is very ill. No, that won't work. They can see he works for a serious job. Tell them somebody's ill. You've got to get some pity working in your favor here.

I looked at them and puked the first canned excuse that popped into my head. "My friend Gavin just lost a very close family member to cancer, and he hasn't been the same since. Please do not write his employer. I will apologize to Mrs. ________ (you didn't call her "Mrs. Garrett" to management or her face)." If you're going to lie, don't chickenshit around. Lie big, enough to make the recipient think "Nah, I don't want to investigate this any further" when he considers your tale. Whether he believes you or not is immaterial. All you need to do is tell a grotesque enough tale to turn them off to the idea of looking into it. I learned this tactic from a friend who flew to Oregon to ski for two weeks before exams in college and came back totally unprepared for any of his tests. My friend, Jay, knew he was dead if tried to wing the first of his exams, and there was no garden variety excuse that would get him an extension. He walked into the professor's office and said he'd had been unable to study because his sister had recently been raped and he'd been forced to fly home to deal with the family crisis.

"You said what? You couldn't just tell him your parents suddenly split, or a grandmother died?"

"Professor Mallory is smart. I couldn't insult him like that."

Jay got the extension.

I don't think the professor believed Jay any further than he could throw him, but what choice did he have? Was he going to call Jay's parents and ask? Was he going to risk feeling like the professor who questioned whether Ferris Bueller's girlfriend's grandfather really died? I think Mallory was impressed Jay would use such a ballsy excuse. You can't help but respect that level of nerve. It feels wrong to bust, or even attempt to bust, someone confident enough to fire off a lie that obscene. I could see Mallory, sitting in his office, laughing to another professor. "I probably should have taught that kid his lesson, but that was just so... nuts."

Barbara was reasonable and didn't think much of the incident. "Write an apology email and promise never, ever, to email that Gavin person. Don't have him sending anything here anymore. Mrs. _______ was pretty offended. Bcc me on it."

Bcc? It took me forever to figure out how where bcc was and how it worked, despite the fact that the bcc box had been right in front of my face all along, in each email window. Ohhhh.... that's what that is.

TO: ElaineK@_______.com
RE: Apology

I am sorry for what Mr. _______ wrote. He didn't mean what he said. He's terribly troubled at the moment. His judgment is compromised. This will never happen again.

I am truly sorry. I look forward to working with you and hope this does not impede our ability to work together. You are a tremendous asset to the firm and you do a fantastic job boosting morale.

About ten minutes later I received an email from Mrs. Garrett accepting the apology.

About twenty minutes later, I received an email from Barbara:

A bit too much melodrama. The 'morale' bit was sappy, but she'll eat it up.

Barbara had inadvertently replied to all - me and Mrs. Garrett.

I didn't reply.

To Be Continued...

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:47 AM