A Winter's Tale

There are five of us temps on my doc review team. Yesterday, because of the snow, the three of us who don't live in the city stayed home. I borrowed a firm laptop to try to work from home because our doc review program won't work on my Mac. The documents weren't loaded into the program, so I couldn't do any work from home yesterday. I left the laptop at home today because I planned to make up the 8 hours I missed tonight and tomorrow night or possibly over the weekend. In the past, it has not been a problem to miss time on one day and make it up on another in the same week.

When we came in today, the associate who supervises us (an ex-temp himself who was made an associate recently) told us the documents had been added to the doc review program and we could resume the online review. I let him know that I hadn't brought the laptop back in and that I planned to talk to the woman who's in charge of the laptops and make sure it was okay to return it on Monday. I talked to her, she had no problem with it. Then, the associate sent me a snippy email saying I needed to return the laptop because it was given to me as a courtesy. I told him the laptop lady said I could keep it, and asked if he still wanted me to return it. He said yes.

I went to his office and asked if I could take it home again if no one else needed to borrow it for the weekend. He gave me the shittiest attitude. I acknowledged that I'm a low priority for laptop borrowing (compared to actual attorneys who actually work here), but if no one else needs it, I don't understand why I can't borrow it. Plus, if I can't use it, then I can't hit my 40 hours for the week. He pretty much told me I can't make up the time.

Later this afternoon, we temps got a weird email from my supervisor's supervisor saying that work is expected to be completed at the office except due to extenuating circumstances (the blizzard was mentioned) on a case-by-case basis. I asked him if I could make up my hours tonight and tomorrow since I had stayed home due to the blizzard, and he said that if I had asked ahead of time, it would be different, but that since I hadn't, the answer was no. I said that I *had* asked ahead of time and gotten permission and asked if that changed his answer (which it should have, since he said it would). He still said no because they didn't have the volume of work to allow people to make up their hours.

Needless to say, I was fucking pissed about all this shit. After my initial confrontation with the snippy associate, my desk neighbor thought I was having an allergic reaction because my neck was red and splotchy. When this project started, there were three of us. In the last few weeks, our ranks have swelled to five, which makes a big difference. If they don't have enough work for five people to do, they shouldn't have added the two new people to the group. If the issue from the get-go was a dearth of work, the snippy associate should have said that instead of berating me about the laptop (a situation that was none of his business and a problem only to him) and his supervisor shouldn't have told me it would be different if I stayed home because of the blizzard or cleared it advance to work from home and then still denied me the chance to make up my hours once I met those two requirements. And how did the simple fact of my wanting to do my work blow up into this tremendous drama?

The temp agency that placed me in this shit-hole has the misfortune of being on my way home, so I stopped by to talk to the recruiter who placed me. That was a good decision. It gave me a chance to vent and get some clarity and perspective. (As a side note, considering the recruiter and the temp agency both make money off my presence at this firm and my number of hours worked, I'm sure the recruiter was very interested to learn both that I was being denied the chance to work 40 hours per week and that the firm has staffed two new people who didn't come through that temp agency on the project.) The recruiter made two points of equal validity: (1) this is a well-paying job in a tough market and there isn't much of anything at a comparable pay scale with which to replace it and (2) it's a temp job, and if I'm miserable, I should quit.