Monday, G made some amusing comment about us "singing as the Titanic goes down."
We received this email from one of our biggest fans: "The news today comes as a surprise, and not a good one. Since you have been here for as long as, or longer than, I have been, from my perspective I am losing an institution."
This made me think about how so many things we had come to think of as "ordinary" have left our life. We pay to check our baggage, and for headphones, meals and blankets on airplanes now. Many items have left the shelves even if you're willing to pay the skyrocketing prices for them. There's less choice now. Everybody's "old life" is being taken away, not just mine. Greece, or for that matter any country in Europe, will never be the same.
By Wednesday, we had had this same conversation several times:
User: Who are we going to run to with these emergencies when you're gone?
Us: You're going to have to contact Fargo, North Dakota.
All: (Looking miserably at each other with nothing more to say).
I gave an attorney a 20 minute training session on how to number his document, after which he rapid-style lectured me (as is his wont) regarding the latest and greatest in music (going to each site on his computer as he talked), and something about his carefree innocence prompted me to ask, "Are you aware the doc center is closing?" No, he hadn't read the email. Guess what he asked me? "You mean I won't be able to get help from you guys any more?"
By Thursday, I wondered where all the work was? Oh yeah, it's going to Fargo, North Dakota. The firm has several people already sending their work there to test it this month, which is why we got a month's notice. Duh. So, that's what "outsourced" means. Somebody else is doing my work. Oh. Duh. Oh. Duh. OH. It keeps sinking in more and more.
So, what I want to know is how is Fargo, North Dakota handling TOAs? Let me tell you about TOAs. I have a thing or two to say before leaving the saga of my career behind me forever.
To begin the saga about TOAs, I have to begin with RoAnn. RoAnn was legendary. Every office manager and every doc center in town knew RoAnn, first name only, like "Cher" or "Madonna."
I was an underwriter in training at an insurance company, where I had started out as a Sycor operator. (I just did an internet search for "Sycor" and nothing came up, so clearly that technology is so obsolete as to not even have any record in human history. Boy, is my life a myth!!) Anyway, I had climbed my way up through rating on the second floor to underwriting on the third floor from the basement where I had started out as a Sycor operator. Insurance was deathly boring and I wasn't making that much more money. RoAnn is the one that told me "the secret." I don't know how I ended up with her phone number, but God bless whoever sent that lunatic my way. She told me to go to such-and-such temp agency and take their free Vydec course. She said all the lawyers in town were using Vydecs and there weren't enough Vydec operators. I learned the Vydec, and additionally RoAnn gave me a crash course showing me exactly the types of things I would be asked to do in a law firm and how to do them, including TOAs. I took a 4 hour course, for a nominal fee, from some bimbo (imagine an "all business" Marilyn Monroe) that showed me the mechanics behind assembling the documents that were being created by people with law degrees. The temp agency sent me to engineering corporations, while RoAnn found me my first job in my first legal document center. It was exactly as RoAnn taught me, and I did well. Most doc center operators had 2 or 3 jobs and we all hired each other round the clock for work on Vydec, IBM, Wang, NBI and eventually WordPerfect when pcs took over.
One day RoAnn was contracted at a firm, needed an evening coordinator, and thought of me. Well, it was a step up, why not? Well, for one thing because she and this firm were crazy (this was the firm where the "Document Center Incident" took place that I have yet to write about). But I didn't know that at the time I accepted her offer, and brought my best friends with me so they could get raises working for a crazy firm, too. This sounds idyllic, but once I was in charge my best friends would stop chatting when I came in the room, stuff like that, and it was horrible. I had to fire my best friend when she had a bipolar episode and wigged out (instead of doing the work, she copied the requests, and returned them as completed). Meanwhile, I was learning that RoAnn was nuts. I think her contract had been to set up a document center and convert to NBI from System 6. Remember those 8" floppy disks? Well, we had to print out all those disks before they could get rid of that monstrosity, and Ro kept taking those disks home and not bringing them back. Never explained why. She eventually was fired, and never got the $5000 bonus for completing her contract. I demoted myself, got all my friends back, and avoided RoAnn for the rest of my life. Last I heard she was going to law school.
Ok, so, as I mentioned, everything I ever learned about TOAs, I learned from RoAnn as part of a 4 hour course. TOAs are "Tables of Authorities." What they are is an index of every legal cite found in the document, listed under separate categories of cases, rules, statutes, etc. separated into state and federal. This means you have to actually know what a legal cite is, and know how it's being used in the document, because just existing in the document doesn't necessarily mean it goes into the table. Assuming you have found a correct cite for inclusion, you have to code it. It's the most complex coding you can do in a document. There are endless ways you can have picked up every cite and still generate a faulty table just because you missed something in the coding. The coding takes hours to do, and the TOAs are always a crashing rush because you can only do them on a final document, and attorneys work on their documents right up to the filing deadlines. If those TOAs don't get done and the deadline gets missed it is always the operator's fault, never the attorney's.
To be fair to my current firm, which I have referred to as "Firm Fairyland" in previous posts, it is the first and only firm I had ever worked for that supported the doc center when there were mistakes in TOAs, and the attorneys were held responsible for the final tables. This has been reason enough for me to feel I worked in fairyland. Our new national document center manager had encouraged sending TOAs out of state when we needed help. This got the job "off the books," but it would inevitably be returned to us to do it again correctly, so they were really something we could never get help with.
Here's the thing: The only people with the knowledge to recognize a correct cite is a lawyer. Legal secretaries and paralegals are supposed to, but they mostly don't. The rare ones that do just "never have time" to do the coding. Over the decades I've seen various software come and go, macros created at various firms, all sorts of tricks and programs to generate TOAs, but they all missed too many cites to be relied upon. I have seen, even been part of, all sorts of training sessions to teach people how to code for TOAs, but they never do it after they learn it. It's just too hard for them. So, document centers have been the default experts on TOAs since forever. I have never done one with confidence, and I can't tell you how happy I would be to never have to do another one.
Maybe now you understand why I'm wondering how Fargo, North Dakota is handling TOAs.
In other news, I have been in a senior meetup group that has mostly turned out to be a little old ladies club. We had a meetup yesterday that was the best one so far. Four other women I had not met before came, and were just the people I needed to meet. One was a petsitter (always good to know one of those), another gets medical insurance for people like me that want an alternative to COBRA. When I expressed concern about my housing situation, another timidly confessed that she hadn't wanted to reveal that she lives in senior housing. She thought we would look down on her. But once she said that we all were interested in how she did that, and what she said changed my life. She said once you turn 62 you can sign up at any rental office of any apt. building for senior housing. It's a HUD thing. She signed up with all the rental offices in the marina. She had to wait 2 years, but she has a 2 bedroom apt with an ocean view, and she pays a third of what Ted and I are paying for our apartment, and we both turned 62 this year. Another lady in the group also found this information valuable, and was even more distraught than me and I hugged her and that turned out to be just what she needed, just a hug. I feel really lucky to have met all of them. I feel like I made 4 new friends, and learned so much stuff about being a senior. It's still sinking in that I'm a "senior" too.
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