I love attorneys!

The first attorney I met was one I hired because a car had hit me and knocked me off my bicycle. I lay unconscious in the middle of a busy intersection. And if not for two off-duty cops that witnessed that accident and saw me lying in the middle of the street and got out to direct traffic I could have been killed. I was so dazed, the only thing I remember about the woman who hit me was that she didn’t speak English and she really looked and sounded sorry when she spoke in her language. I don’t remember how I ended up with this attorney, but he got all my medical bills paid for 2 years (something I thought was a miracle), plus $500. I don’t remember what I paid him, but even if his fee was 100% (which would represent maybe 10-15 hours of work at ’70s rates) I would have gladly paid it. And it also occurs to me as I write this to find the names of those cops and send them a thank-you note.


The next attorneys in my life were the ones in big law firms that had document centers. Attorneys in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles were the first (and perhaps only) segment of the population to value what word processors could do for them, and paid big bucks for a savvy one. I’ve worked in engineering, scientific and insurance firms, but attorneys paid three times what they would. Of course, they rode us hard and wet and there were some real spy thriller, roller coaster rides I’ll tell you about sometime. Truly, I owe you those stories, and while we’re on the subject, as much as I love writing with pen and paper, word processing has been a blessing for me not only because it gave me a livelihood, but I was suddenly able to get my thoughts on paper as fast as I think them!  True progress for man, one giant step for ME!  But I don’t want to digress.


To continue, when everybody and their grandparents had their own personal computers and document centers were being disbanded all over the country, I knew I was doomed. How did I know I was a fossil? Well, this happened shortly after the Kaypro went extinct. What’s a Kaypro? Exactly. I needed a new line of work. I became a real estate investor. That’s another story I’ll have to tell you about sometime. But for now I really am trying to make a point here.


Just around this time I ended up in the Lost Decade (another story that I may never tell you, other than I, uh, lost a decade. Let’s just say I had a decade-long autistic episode), and by the time I woke up well, what do you know? The world changed back and attorneys had figured out that they just couldn’t live without their word processors after all. Thank god, because there was nothing else I knew how to do, and after waking up to a new world in a new decade, I had time-warp anxiety and wasn't in any state to learn any more technology than I happened to have under my belt. Guess what? There are still judges in courts in this land that refuse to receive anything but WordPerfect documents. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came up with an old Kaypro disk. Turns out that laws and courts are resistant to technological change, and they really want those old dinosaurs like me. And here at Firm Fairyland, I felt impossibly appreciated. Really underpaid, but so appreciated I just didn’t care that I got paid less and had less benefits than I would have had anywhere else. I had just crawled out of a cave, I was happy to get paid a salary from a decade ago. And now a decade has passed, and I’m thinking about when I first got hired a decade ago, in the days when I complained about things like low pay and wages. Now, of course, I know that wages and benefits have no significance on the life I create whatsoever. But, I digress.


The firm I had worked at prior to Firm Fairyland (before my 15 minutes of real estate mogul fame, keep up now) I compared to a concentration camp. But even in this horrible place a really nice attorney helped me write David’s and my wills (I mean for no charge), which we have used as a template ever since. And friend Geo keeps copies of them (well, only mine, now), since she’s a - you guessed it – attorney. She gave us really good free advice, too! Something I had never heard from any other attorney. But not to digress, here’s an example of a typical “concentration camp firm” incident. One day a dearly loved co-worker of many years was having some physical problem. I called an ambulance and his girlfriend, as he made light of it and continued to “work,” and my other, also dearly loved, co-worker planted herself in the corner of the office and refused to take her eyes off him in case he collapsed. In other words, all work in the document center had stopped. Our supervisor ordered us back to work. I was terrified and cowed, but friend-in-corner was black and got ghetto on her ass and just glared at her. I don’t remember exactly what transpired after that, but I do remember that it wasn’t our supervisor backing down or management failing to address our refusal to work.


So, back to about a year after starting to work here, at Firm Fairyland, who waltzes in to interview for the document center manager position? You guessed it, that supervisor. Let’s just call her Bitch. The personnel manager at the time (let’s call her Lily) interviewed her. Lily has an excellent memory, and a quick glance at Bitch’s resume revealed that Bitch and I had worked together, so Lily inquired about that and received this reply: “Oh yes. We had issues.” This was all Lily needed to hear, because she couldn’t imagine anyone having “issues with” me. Lily also told me that the office manager had told her that “I had turned white” when he had asked me about her, and that he had also said “that was all he needed to know.” This may all sound reasonable or even common sense, but to me, at that time, thoughtfulness like this was life changing. Wow, I get treated like an actual human being here. But we now know that this was Diana’s firm, which brings up another magnificent attorney, legendary even. Her secretary plans to start a facebook page for her. I think that’s brilliant. She told me she has received hundreds of calls from people who didn’t know Diana passed. I confirmed, “hundreds?” She nodded yes, “hundreds.” I can’t even imagine. She has told hundreds of people that didn’t know, that Diana died. This just hit me as I am writing this. She couldn’t be doing any other work. She must simply be on the phone all day telling people Diana died. Boy, does her job suck. I can’t believe that. I will have to verify that tomorrow. Here’s what her secretary looked like today. She looks blissed out enough to have been spending the past 2 weeks doing that, right?

Diana had once told me that her ex-fiance had been the prosecutor on the first major law suit against the Church of Scientology, which, by the way, brought his firm down. He had had the largest prosecuting firm in his city before that case. Interestingly (I learned from Diana), he had won the case but neither he nor his client ever saw a dime. Diana told me about having mysterious cars tailing them at that time. Anyway, he sounds like another great attorney.


My point is, some attorneys are great, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Here’s another attorney I enjoyed knowing, at the horrible firm. He was a tender, poetry-writing soul, that one day found a growth on his vocal cord and stopped talking for 6 months. When he healed and was finally able to talk again he made a point of coming into the doc center to talk to us first. A few months later he decided to take a year off. I don’t think he ever came back. His priorities in life had changed. He was an inspiration.


Attorneys have given me a livelihood I can stand. I don’t know that there is anything else I could have stood to have done for the long days and weeks and double shifts I’ve pulled. I’ve met brilliant minds, wits, and souls. I lucked into a career path with no “up” but lots of adventure. You know adventures like this: Spending the last 2 days on an unstable document, Day 1 working on it, and Day 2 answering the National Tech Queen’s questions about it, digging up old copies of various reincarnations of it from various computer trash bins, and answering some more questions about exactly what I did to it, then having her apologize to me for offending me, requiring that I assure her that no offense was taken, I was just trying to answer her questions accurately. It wasn’t at all as if I was on a filing rush, while dealing with two (2) new secretaries that didn’t have half a brain between them incessantly calling me with such gems as: “Should I print my document?” God bless them, at least they have jobs, and are apparently worth what they are probably being paid, which I pray is less than what I am paid.


It just seems that no matter what has happened to you, it had to have been an adventure, at least for you. Maybe nobody else might think so, or they might cluck and shake their heads, but I don’t care if you were stillborn, you had an adventure. I could see myself just wanting to dip my toe in the water. You know, sort of sticking my finger through the looking glass and seeing it disappear into the other side and thinking, “ok, that’s enough.” And I might try again, and maybe even try life for a whole day next time!


What I mean is, whether you were born in an open field after the earthquake in Haiti, or starving in Pakistan floods, ethnically cleansed, born into a tough neighborhood where you have to join a gang to survive, were sexually abused, seduced into a fundamentalist religion and blew yourself up in a crowded place, or were born deaf, blind, deformed, terminally ill, or stolen as a child and forced into the life of a soldier by killing your brother or you would be killed and forced to fight in a war for 20 years, held hostage, brainwashed by a cult, or a myriad other horrible scenarios that take place on this planet - all of those things steal our minds, stunt our growth and give us a challenge we need to overcome so we can learn and progress.  A woman that healed from an eating disorder of many years called it an "abduction."  And don't we just have the adventures of our lifetimes??  I never found where they say this, but David told me he heard Abraham say, “most of life is stagnation.” That just blew me away. We grow during stagnation. People are always having these epiphanies that they wasted their lives in some way. But none of it is a waste. The moment we finally escape to freedom is so glorious you wouldn't trade it for anything, and soon the past is over and we have moved past the bondage.  We are so free that we are free to choose bondage, and bondage is one step or stage on The Path that we need to figure out, and then it’s on to the next life lesson, the next level of freedom, awareness, Nirvana, Truth. At least, that’s where I’m headed, and if you’re following me, then that’s where you’re headed, too.


Here is a very free place, Diana’s office.