Anonymous Lawyer

There's an associate in the office who has the flu, or the avian flu, or something pretty terrible. She came in yesterday and spent the day coughing loudly enough you could hear her down the hall. I told her to try and be a little more considerate. She asked if she should go home, but I told her obviously that wasn't an option given her workload but she should definitely try and cut down on the coughing and that might even make it easier for her to get the work done.

So this morning she calls up and says she's really feeling terrible and she wanted to "work from home," but I know that scheme and I told her it's not going to work this time and she really needs to come in. And, again, she spends half the day coughing, even after I told her not to. She's coughing out of spite because I wouldn't let her stay home, obviously. And it's a game I just don't have time to play this week, with a deadline on a response brief and a bunch of other clients with time-sensitive work we need to get out by the end of the year.

So I see her sneaking out at about 7:30 tonight and I asked her how far she'd gotten on the piece of the research she's working on, and she said she hasn't finished yet, so I told her to turn back around and finish it before she left, and to please use the service elevator when she finally does leave because I don't need her germs infecting everyone else. We're going to have to clean her office and get rid of whatever she's got, because she hasn't been smart enough to keep herself healthy at crunch time. You need to take care of yourself so you don't get sick, because you're not really allowed to get sick here. Bonus time is coming. I'm hoping we can play around with her billable hour reports so she doesn't get a full bonus, as payback for this whole "sick" thing. I'm sick too. Sick of her.

I'm also sick of the generic post-it notes and their lack of sufficient stickiness. Generic everything is pretty terrible.