Today I get to start putting the kitchen back together. Since we're going to have to order the cabinet lighting from an electrical supply house I am not going to wait to put things in the upper cabinets, I will just move anything in the way of the installation when the time comes. That style of light only requires one wire for the entire system so it's not a big deal.

Then I am going to sit down with the South Beach Diet Cookbook and make a list of ingredients of recipes I want to try. I want to cook! I want to eat real food! I have lived on the oddest assortment of crap during this remodeling (but avoided spending a cent on take-out) and I'm craving good food. I'm excited about cooking again.

I have a work saga to tell, and it's blogworthy because I've already discussed it with all the relevant parties at work. My working situation sucks right now. When I was hired last October I was told there was no money in the budget for a secretary for us yet, and I said no problem, I'd pitch in with the secretarial work, just as Boss did. They have a production typist to do dictation, Boss answers his own phone, this mainly involved making copies and sending out mail and filing. No problem, I am always willing to do whatever has to be done to get the work out the door. But as months passed and our workload grew, the secretarial side of the job cut into my billable hours more and more, and I realized last week that at this point it's eating up 3/4 of my time. We handle large construction cases, often a dozen parties involved, which means every pleading filed has to go to a dozen people, and incoming mail is similarly massive. This doesn't even address the document productions and other paper that IS a legitimate part of my job, this is just the copying, envelope stuffing, and of course massive, staggering amounts of filing as 12 lawyers schedule and cancel and re-schedule and write snotty letters to each other every day, and that's just ONE case. Multiply it by 40 or so. So I'm drowning in secretarial tasks and it's getting worse with each new case. We are getting a ton of new cases all at once, and each one pushes the secretarial side of my workload that much higher. I hit my breaking point this week.

At the same time, my friend L has been working for a big and very cushy law firm downtown and they are hiring, and she told me to send a resume and they are all excited and can't wait for me to send one. And I'm sorely tempted, because the bottom line is I didn't get a BA and a CLA and then spend 15 years honing my knowledge of construction issues to play secretary all day. At the big law firm I would have a secretary. And a mailroom. And minions on staff to do the copying and order office supplies. And, I know damn well they'd pay me more.

So the Boss, who is not really my boss, and I have been friends for a decade and I am always honest with him, so on Thursday I bitched to him about my cosmic job dissatisfaction. He in turn told our real boss that if something wasn't done I would leave. The real boss, who is a good guy, immediately sent this up the food chain to the Big Boss a thousand miles away, who is duly concerned and is looking for solutions. Nobody wants me to leave. OTOH, based on the conversations yesterday, the proposed solutions to the problem are still woefully inadequate. To do our jobs right we could use a full time secretary and a file clerk, but I know that's never going to happen, so I'm pushing for at least a part-time legal secretary on a daily, permanent basis, not a temporary band-aid solution to shut Catherine up for now. But that's what yesterday's discussion sounded like to me - "Maybe we can borrow a secretary who wants a few hours of overtime...." They are still not getting it. I am still willing to do secretarial work as needed to keep the paper flowing, I am not and never have been one of those "Oh, that's secretarial, I don't do that!" snots, but I damn well refuse to let it eat my entire day. This isn't why I took this job.

Coincidentally, yesterday produced a fine example of how this is causing problems. Boss called me at the end of the day as he was prepping for depos scheduled for next week, because this is a case I know better than he does, and as we talked I realized, to my horror, that I had intended to follow through on getting a plat and the covenants for the site and reviewing them, and hadn't done either. Why? Because actual paralegal work is getting pushed aside by the enormous volume of filing and copying and scheduling and on and on. Boss wasn't upset, he knows exactly how Shit Happens in this job, but I'm sick of not having time to focus on substantive work. It bothers ME when I don't follow through, even when it's because I'm drowning in other work. I don't want to sound like a prima donna, but dammit, I can't work like this anymore, it's making me crazy. This is bullshit.

I'm going to send my resume to the other firm and see what happens there, and see if my current employer can do anything about these problems. I don't want to leave - I like my colleagues, I like the cases, I like my short commute - but I could do a lot better at the big firm and my talents are being wasted in this job, and Boss and the real boss and the real boss's boss all know this. So, we'll see what happens.

And I have no problem discussing it on the blog, because everybody who matters at work has already heard it. I didn't say anything here I wouldn't say to my boss's face, profanity included.