The story of the second apology, requires an explain of the "Why?" behind it...

The French Cuffed Assembly Line

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years / Then they expect you to pick a career / When you can't really function you're so full of fear... And you think you're so clever and class less and free / But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see / A working class hero is something to be
- Lennon, J.

"The firm prides itself on creativity. We apply novel approaches for our clients, and find new ways to win. We work hard, but it's a lot of fun."
- Nasally Suit in Interviews 1, 3, 6, 9-12

Only a whore, a fool or a sociopath speaks or believes that gibberish. But that won't stop at least one hiring committee member from farting it into the conversation at every law firm interview. Lawyers market themselves as "sharp," "cutting edge" and "creative," as though their 19^th century piecework business model were an industry secret. One summer working on a clock in a warehouse showed me the evil of the billable hour. At that point, between high school and college, I'd have offered my body for drug experiments to cover the bar tabs and beach weekends. But even in that naïve, permadrunk poverty, I knew being on the clock was rotten and wrong, an anathema to every notion of dignity wrapped into the concept of The Human Experience. Only a man with shit for brains willingly submits to that servitude. I quit in August and lived on nothing until college started, drinking piss beer, bumming cigarettes and filling the gas tank with spare change. It still beat punching a timecard every morning. A stale Natural Lite at 3:00 on a deck chair will always taste better than the coldest dash-from-work-to-happy-hour draft.

I know what you're thinking. I'm a hypocrite - I wound up working on the clock for the better part of the past decade anyway. You're right, to a degree. But what does that say about you, chained to your desk, reading this? Let's suspend disbelief and pretend forces beyond our control brought us here and hold us like cement shoes - that we can't try to spend the only time we'll ever have doing something that interests us. Let's pretend it's not irrational fear of stepping athwart the senseless, self-perpetuating structures and systems we've been taught to blindly obey that chain your eyes to this monitor every day. We'll assume the myth that You Can't Just Leave, that You Can't Reinvent Your Life, is actually true.

But back to the point...

The 'fun" in law lies somewhere between the "fun" of root canal and hemorrhoid surgery. The billable hour world runs on the blood of automatons who wouldn't know creativity if it crawled up their ass and exploded with the force of an M-80. "Thinking like a lawyer" isn't developing new, revelatory powers of perception so much as forgetting the way you, the person, thought. You can't download the "automaton" software the professors and partners try to install in your head without clearing the hard drive of some of you. The zombies plodding along the hallways of law firms aren't all genetic dullards. The 1000 yard stare, the sunken, defeated eyes, the "Office Shellshock" - wages of thousands of hours of boredom and the tyranny of endless empty timesheets mocking them every morning... "Dance for me, monkey."

Like the 30% of white collar 'actors' who play diligent workers every day, my brain works like a turbo engine. When a deadline finally forces me to do some dull task, I fire the jets and knock off the eight hour project in four. I also have one talent - I can twist a good phrase. I can write and talk people into seeing things my way, a long bomb the "automatons" can't throw. An atrocious student, I realized early this was my only ticket to anything above a cubicle. From grade school through high school, every elective course I took was graded on papers or presentations. If I couldn't talk or write my way to at least a "Gentleman's C," I didn't take the course. This got me into a decent college, where I shopped courses by grading leniency of professor, popping myself onto the Dean's List with "The History or Cricket," "South American Political Geography," "Feminist Themes in Canterbury Tales" and "Extemporaneous Poetry" (getting high or drunk before class and spouting a slurry of mingled Nirvana and Robert Hunter lyrics). This waste of my folks' money tripled the depth of my social calendar, provided me with an inflated GPA and...

Left me utterly unqualified for any lucrative career.

Hence, law school.

Sooner or later, the "gaming of the system" ends for every slacker, and I'm no exception. After three more lost years when I allegedly attended "Law School," I found myself a spurt worker in a billable hour business. I crammed when a brief was due, but on the slow days, days when I was supposed to be doing research, writing file memos and preparing cases, I didn't do shit. I wasn't going to sit around and read opinions, rules or statutory footnotes. I was insulted they thought I was the sort of person suited to do so. But I also knew nobody read file memos, so I'd just cobble together pieces of other memos I found on the system and bill the maximum time I could get away with for the project. The people in charge didn't give a damn - they got their billables out of me.¹ I found myself with piles and piles of free time, but I couldn't leave the office.

The internet eventually got boring, even in the days when you could still look at soft core porn at the office. There were only so many bulletin boards, online stores and pictures of nude celebrities. I'd argued on endless chat boards about everything from Bourbon vs. Irish Whiskey to whether participation in bukkake showed bisexual tendencies. I knew Shauna Sand better than her gynecologist, could tell you the month (and sometimes location) in which a Pam Anderson spread had been shot based on her pubic hairstyle, purchased every pair of pants J. Crew sold and read more swingers' ads than Charlie Sheen.

I realized I had a problem when I found myself ordering $30.00 copies of import versions of post-Ozzie Black Sabbath discs (yes, the Ronnie James Dio albums) and trying to round out a collection of all the Credence Clearwater Revival records. The nadir was ordering Billy Joel discs. Finding "Glass Houses" in your mailbox is a horrible low, the equivalent of masturbating to a morning aerobics show. Rock bottom - a cry for help. It was only a matter of time until I found myself humming "Captain Jack" over breakfast with middle aged swingers at a rural Friendly's. The final straw was finding myself posting fake profiles on dating boards. "I'm 6'4, dark, fit. Looking for a woman who loves Emerson Lake & Palmer and doesn't shave any body hair." My desperate search for stimulation had taken me to a cruel and senseless place. I needed something else, something amusing, entertaining... worth thinking about...

'Jackin'

Relax, don't do it / When you want to go to it / Relax, don't do it / When you want to come / When you want to come / When you want to come / Come-huh
- Goes to Hollywood, F.

I resorted to making prank calls from the office to amuse myself. But these were no ordinary prank calls.

I first learned about three way crank calls in seventh grade. One day, while sitting next to my friend Charlie's pool, sipping cranberry juice and Sambuca (you took what you could get from the folks' liquor cabinet), we hit upon a fantastic idea. We'd use Charlie's parents' new three way calling line for prank calls. After about two hours of linking convents with sex shops, class bullies with their prey and suicide hotlines with the Asian family up the street who spoke broken English ("Counsel what? You want me to go to hospital? I not sick. Not sick!"), we were bored. Then it hit us. We'd set up three way calls linking the parents of our friends who were engaged in the most bitter divorces. This was the age where many of my friends' folks were getting unhitched. Dad bought a Porsche, got caught fucking his assistant/nurse/associate, and soon found himself getting served with divorce papers. It was a rich, indeed inexhaustible, vein.

The three way prank call sounds much easier than it is to execute. This is not some cheap "call the emergency room, put on an exaggerated Indian accent and cry about how you have a cocaine breaded gerbil stuck in your rectum" Jerky Boys stunt. The three way prank call is a masterpiece of perfect timing and coordination. It is the Hail Mary of prank calls, and like the Hail Mary, it only works once out of every dozen or so attempts.

You call the father first. Men are naturally slower to answer the telephone and, being unfamiliar with the layout of his new bachelor pad, Mr. _____ may not even recall where the phone is located. As soon as the phone starts ringing, you dial Mrs. ____ and conference her into the call. Frequently, you'll get misfires where Mr. ______ answers quickly, only to hear the ringing of Mrs. _____'s phone. In that circumstance, you have a quick decision to make. You either abort the mission or allow Mr. _______ to listen to the rings, which is usually pretty amusing itself. "Hello? What is this? Operator? Operator?!!" In that circumstance, Mr. ______, already confused and frustrated, will explode when Mrs. ____ answers on the other end. However, he'll also know it's a prank, as Mrs. _____ will sound confused when she answers mid-way through him yelling for the operator.

To truly work a successful three way prank call between the separated, Mr. and Mrs. ______ must answer almost simultaneously, without even hearing a ring.

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Who's this?"

"Who's this?"

"Why are you calling me?"

"Why are you calling me?"

"I didn't call you."

"You're drunk again. You're always drunk, running from your life... from your family..."

"I drank because you were frigid..."

"Well now you've got a whore to fix that!"

The ideal result is a volcanic explosion, not unlike the coke addled frenzy Henry Hill's wife goes into when she catches him screwing a blow skank near the end of "Goodfellas." If you linked up the right parents - the doctor whose wife caught him screwing a babysitter at the summer home - you could get those moments.

Sadly, due to Caller ID, the three way prank exists today mostly in legend. But that didn't stop me from resurrecting it at the office.

I learned later in life, for reasons we'll not discuss here, that Pennsylvania had automated 1-800 hotlines for queries regarding sexual diseases. When I first started practicing, office Caller ID wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is today. I'd call every one of those automated lines, from "Syphilis Symptoms" to "Vaginal Discharge" and link them to friends' office phones. I'd sit in my office, listen to the friend answer the telephone and listen as he or she would yell over the tape recorded voice.

"...intense itching in the pubic region accompanied by tiny red pinpoint spots is a symptom of... genital warts are asymptomatic in males..."

"Who the hell is this? You fucking jackass!"

I'd hang up when I'd had enough giggles, stare at the phone and think, What the hell is the matter with me? Happy hours were always amusing, as my friends would gripe to one another about receiving calls from strange tape recorded voices talking about pubic shampoo and the importance of using Nonoxyl 9 coated condoms. Being familiar with the terminology used in every call, I'd pretend to suffer from the same prank calls. I don't think I ever admitted to their faces that I was the culprit. But they found out.

I was relaying these juvenile stories to a friend of mine in California several years ago when he gave me what he called "The Jackin' Line." It was a 415 area code reservation line for a weekly all male masturbation party. The voice on the other end made Harvey Fierstein sound like Clint Eastwood.

"Hello, you've reached Jackin', the Bay Area's largest mutual masturbation get together. The parties start every Wednesday at 8:00 sheeaaarp. The ground rules for Jackin' boys are easy. Jackin' is purely about self pleasure in the company of other men who enjoy watching and being watched. You will be provided with a comfortable chair and refreshments. You must bring your own lubrication and toys. No drugs, and alcohol must be checked at the door. No aggressive behavior. And there is no sex in Jackin', or stroking by others. Jackin' is about self pleasure - you and you alone do the Jackin'. Oral or anal sex is strictly forbidden. If you do either, you will be asked to leave. The entrance fee is $50.00. Please press 1 to make your reservation for Jackin'. Be sure to come early, and come often."

Delicious. A gift from above. I promptly used it on just about everybody I knew. One of my favorite targets was a buddy named Flynn, who worked for a small shop directly across the street. Flynn was overworked and miserable about his pay and his bosses, most of whom forced him to work, I mean, bill, 200 hours per month. He'd go off like a firecracker during prank calls. I mean, he'd actually get angry. "I don't have the fucking time for this!" I used my personal long distance code to call the Jackin' line. When I finally got through (I later learned many people called the line for various gag purposes or purely out of perverted curiosity), I quickly conferenced over to Flynn's number.

"Hello? McCarthy, O'Malley and DiNardo."

"Is _____ Flynn available?"

"I think. Hold one second."

I checked the other line to see where the Jackin' emcee was in the narrative. "...oral or anal sex is strictly..." Perfect.

"Who is this speaking?"

"Frank... Betson. Friend... from... college."

"Please hold."

I got nervous. I couldn't wait. I linked the lines and held the phone to my ear with my hand cupped over the speaking end.

Unfortunately, as I was doing this, Marvin from the securities litigation group stepped into my doorway. "Are you busy?" I was still grinning. Marvin gave me a stern look that translated to "put the fucking phone down." He could tell I was doing something wholly unproductive and likely juvenile. Marvin wasn't the cross-examining type. That would require first giving a shit, and second, effort. Marvin was clinically depressed and just wanted to be left alone. Policing associate behavior was the lowest priority imaginable in his world.

Marvin and his ilk are average guys who are proficient in their niche practices and have their own little stable of clients. They use the firm as a staging platform, but don't give a shit about it. Its larger success means nothing to them because they get paid based on their book alone. If the firm goes under, they take their business to another. They're often surly sorts, with horrible kids who wreck cars and get thrown out of Colgate for dope possession and high maintenance wives who put new a new kitchen or bathroom in the house every four months and mail them chest pain inducing credit card bills from Saks.

The Marvins of the world are beaten. They're the decent guys who didn't escape the law business young, when all the other good people threw in the towel and went to in-house counsel gigs or left the field entirely. They're stuck, golden handcuffed and too old to do anything else. Marvin didn't want to be in my office. He didn't want to be in anyone's office, including his own. He was "mailing it in" from both a work and personal perspective - shot, a shell of his former self. He decided there was no point making chit chat about the weather or the Phillies to anyone anymore. It had all been said before. And most of his peers only wanted to gossip about who was getting axed up in the latest partnership fracas anyway. Like Colonel Kurtz, Marvin was whittling away his days the only way he knew, "waiting for someone to take the pain away."

Marvin long ago learned that it was no use befriending or torturing the kids because 90% of them would be fired or leave within a few years. Why invest the effort? He didn't give a shit what I was doing when he walked into my doorway. He just wanted to pawn off a boring assignment he didn't want to do, then go back to his office, close his door and hide. He certainly didn't feel like dealing with me while I was grinning and stifling a laugh, my face contorted like that of a mildly retarded child or some idiot cheerleader passing gossip. My pained smirk begged a question Marvin didn't want to ask. He just needed a motion on short notice, and I was apparently the only body available for the job.

"You done on the phone? Here's what I want..."

It took him three minutes to explain the assignment, during which time neither of us made a single comment to the other that even remotely approached a social interaction. Marvin didn't dislike me; he just didn't have the time or energy to even consider me on any level other than "functionary."
Watching Marvins plod about the halls gave me the piss shivers. If you're not the amoral, political shrewdie type who run firms, or one of the clueless Eugenes sucking down their $250k thinking This Is the Brass Ring because they're too institutionalized to know any better, you become Marvin - a well paid walking zombie, sailing from day to day in the boredom induced organic equivalent of a Lithium haze. I saw myself as Marvin someday, serving a life sentence in law, perhaps in this particular prison.

Fuck. I missed the whole call.

As soon as Marvin's back passed beyond the threshold of my door, I picked up the phone and dialed Flynn's office.

"Is _____ Flynn there?"

Dead silence.

"Is _____ Flynn there?"

Silence again.

"Hello? Is Flynn there?"

I was met with a trembling response. "You... you. You are sick. Sick! I know who you are, Mr. _______. And I am going to press charges. Disgusting! In my life, I have never..."

I hung up. Jesus Christ... That... wasn't good.

My phone rang. Gingerly, I plucked the receiver from the cradle and slowly pulled it to my ear. "You fucking asshole. You fucking asshole!" It was Flynn.

"Up front, don't pretend it wasn't you. The receptionist recognized your voice. You call here all the fucking time. Look, they're going to call your firm if you don't say you're sorry. Frank Betson? The receptionist listened to the whole goddamned message, trying to understand it. She tried to write the fucking thing down."

"Well, I never... That's fucking impossible. She couldn't be that stupid."

"She's a fucking reborn Christian from Illinois - South Illinois. You sent a gay bukkake invite to a fuckin' holy roller! She's rambling all kinds of biblical shit. I'm going to have to explain to the partners why we have a fucking worker's comp claim from her. And she knows it was you. You have to do something. Now."

Horrible - this was a shit sandwich from every angle. What does one buy a distressed Jesus freak? What sort of peace offering says "I'm sorry about forcing you to transcribe a bukkake reservation line?"

"Do you have anything religious?"

"Like, for Easter?"

"No, just generally religious. Jesus stuff. Any pictures of God or stuff about saints?"

"This is a pretty secular flower shop."

"Well, I have this religious friend and she's really upset. Do you have any flowers in crucifix arrangements? Can you whip up something like that quick?"

"Uh, we have a funeral arrangement that somebody forgot to pick up."

The "Into God's Arms" wrapping paper on the arrangement basket was totally misplaced for the occasion, but I was a man with minutes to live.

"I'll take it," I snapped, ripping the wrapper off the basket.

"What would you like on the card?"

"I'm sorry. Please accept my deepest apologies. Warmly, _______."

I slid my credit card through the machine, signed the receipt and jetted across the street with the blue and yellow bouquet.

"Here."

"Oh no... you give it to her," Flynn laughed at me.

Flynn took me to a break room where the receptionist was sitting. She was indeed quite bent.

"It's just sick, it's just sick. This place, you people. I pray for you."

"I'm... really... sorry. I never realized..."

"I know this doesn't mean a lot, but I am truly repentant." Repentant? Perfect bible language. You brilliant bastard. I even added a tremble to my voice for sincerity as I handed her the bouquet.

The bouquet didn't appear to calm things too much. It was cheap damage control and it came off as exactly that. The receptionist scanned it, a bit puzzled at the odd blue and gold UCLA color scheme, and then made her way to the card. As she did this, I started in with the really profuse apologies. "I truly didn't know what I was thinking. I would never want to upset someone..."

After scanning the card, she looked up at me. "In Memory of Lonny 'Balls' Burke... Local 313 will never forget you. Enjoy fitting those pipes in the sky?"

"It's the thought that counts?"

----------

¹ The dozen or so categories of tricks lawyers use to pad their hours without getting caught by clients will be the subject of an in depth, lengthy piece later. Some people call this fraud - lawyers call it "value billing" or "maximizing time recapture."

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 11:30 AM

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