Instant Karma

Despite the fact that Da Law is an area fraught with ethical uncertainty, I have faced surprisingly little of it during my career with Dewey Billem Fivehundredbucksperhour & Howe. This may be due to the fact that my area of expertise, computers, tends to be as black-and-white as a skunk farm. By way of example, here is an issue which might be faced by a technician, as well as several possible solutions. Try to pick the ethical choice!

Mr. Partnerstein calls from a conference room on the 187th floor. "I have a meeting with some VERY IMPORTANT CLIENTS in half an hour," he barks, "And your stupid 'fire-wall' thing won't let me get to a website I need!" "Which website would that be, sir?", you inquire. "Dirrrty Swifferin' Housewives!", he replies. "Oh... really?", you murmur. "Shit, yeah!", says Mr. Partnerstein, who has been known to put away more than a few little plastic cups of white zinfandel at the annual Mergers/Acquisitions/Rapes/Pillages Departmental retreat, "Gotta do SOMETHING to take the edge off before I meet with these dipshits."

Do you... :

A. Unblock the website immediately. If the fate of a fifty-million dollar merger rests upon Mr. Partnerstein tossing one off before meeting with opposing counsel, so be it. You can only hope he washes his hands before raiding the ever-present bagel platter.

B. Ask your manager whether or not the site should be unblocked. This is complicated decision, and you feel it would be prudent to seek the wisdom of your superior. Also, ew.

C. Advise Mr. Partnerstein that you cannot unblock the site in question, as it is both unrelated to the practice of law and hilariously bad. I mean, c'mon... Misti Fjords didn't even look like she MEANT it in that scene with Chad Studlington and the coffee grinder!

D. Advise Mr. Partnerstein that you cannot unblock the site in question, as it is both unrelated to the practice of law and an abomination, and by the way, being jabbed in the rebuttal by Lucifer's razor-pronged pitchfork for all eternity will make disbarment and humiliation look like a relaxing jaunt to the Hamptons.

Correct Answer: none of the above! See, this is why I am a technician, garnering such lavish perks as "cubicle with three and a HALF walls" and "free soft pretzels every third Friday"! The correct choice must be calculated by a sophisticated equation which takes into account the following factors:

S - the likelihood that Mr. Partnerstein will descend into hysterics, ala "I DID NOT SPEND THE EQUIVALENT OF A MODEST SUBURBAN HOME ON THREE YEARS OF FANCY-PANTS LAW SCHOOL FOR THIS CRAAAAAAAP!"

F - the probability that you will be able to steal a snack from the bagel platter in Mr. Partnerstein's conference room without being discovered. Increase this factor by 20% if said snack includes cream cheese or sprinkles.

D - the inevitability of your humorless supervisor taking you aside and forcing you to have a lengthy, awkward conversation about the boundaries of excellent customer service as they relate to the collected oeuvre of Misti Fjords.

Okay, so perhaps the IT field is not as ethically cut-and-dried as I thought. However, I was seven years into my career before I faced a genuine moral conundrum.

---

The Time: late last week.
The Place: Jul's resplendent, three-and-a-half-walled cubicle.
The Setup: my sole female coworker (let's call her Betty) rushes over to my desk, wide-eyed, and hisses, "YOU NEED TO SEE THIS RIGHT NOW! C'MON!" and scurries away.

"Huh," thought I, "Maybe she found some leftover danishes or something!" (Technicians are terrifying in their pursuit of free food. Every now and again, an unsuspecting new coworker will bring in homemade cookies; the aftermath is usually a lot like that scene in "Jurassic Park" where the velociraptors enjoy a hearty dinner of Bleating Goat Tartare.)

"What's up?", I said, ambling over to Betty's desk.

"Okay, okay, so...", she began, clearly uncomfortable, "Y'know that folder out on the network where all of the documents that secretaries send through the scanner are supposed to go?"

"Yeah," I said, "What about it?"

"Someone was scanning documents, but they weren't showing up there. So I was poking around, trying to see what was up, when I found... um... this." She looked around to see that no one was watching, then opened a window on her screen.

"HOLY SHIT!", I said.

"Yeah, that's what I said," said Betty.

"That's... that's...," I stammered.

"That's a big black ass," Betty said.

"Yes. Yes, it is," I said.

"And there's MORE, too," said Betty.

"Dude, that sure looks like all of it to me," I said.

The firm's communal scanned-documents folder is usually a mishmash of copyright-violating "Koko-Kola" logos and lengthy documents with titles like "OPPOSING COUNSEL RESPONSE TO STATEMENT OF INTENT RE: PANTS, FIRM'S MOTION TO SUE THEM RIGHT OFF OF DEFENDANT".

On the day in question, however, the folder was host to Big Black Ass-travaganza '06. There were no fewer than ten photos of the B.B.A., every bulge, dip and dimple highlighted in harshly-lit glory.

"There's one with a face, too," said Betty.

I gasped. "Do NOT TELL ME...", I began.

"Yeah," she said, "It's Mabel."

"Oh, damn it to hell," I sighed as Betty opened the last photo. Mabel was a very sweet, middle-aged administrative assistant who worked in another department. We saw her from time to time around the office, scooting to the copier in comfy, oversized dresses, clutching massive sheaves of paper. Unlike many of the harried law-tomatons in our office, she always stopped to smile and ask how we were doing.

The Mabel of the last photo wore a very different smile than any we'd ever seen. "I am SEXY, goddamn it," she seemed to be saying as she hiked up her skirt to display a pair of roomy cotton panties, "You KNOW you want some of this!"

I myself had not one iota of desire to get into Mabel's faded pink Hanes Her Ways. However, there was something so sweet, so earnest about the expression on her face in that last photo. This wasn't a picture of a stiletto-heeled vixen... this was gentle, good-humored Mabel, only removed from the office and spiced up with a stiff shot of freakiness.

"I, uh... I guess she didn't know that they'd wind up in the group folder, huh?", I said.

"Gee, d'ya THINK?", said Betty.

We sat silently for a moment. I thought about the various routes we could take... telling HR, telling her boss, telling our boss, posting the pics on Great-Big-Black-Ass.com.

---

I also thought about how cruel and cutthroat our culture can be, and the delight we take in eviscerating others for their mistakes. The papers were still having journalistic multiple-orgasms over the Mel Gibson fiasco (incidentally, the headline "Mel's Meltdown" made me vow that, if I ever attain notoriety, I shall change my name to "Psychotica McLapsington"). Mel's behavior was obnoxious, dangerous and ridiculous, and the public ass-reaming it merited didn't seem entirely unwarranted. However, what about Monica Lewinsky? Developed a crush on an inappropriate man, acted on it in a very inappropriate way... and will be punished for it until the day she dies. What about Britney?

I've forgotten to strap J.Q. into his car seat, I've arrived on the scene too late to prevent him from ingesting Kibbles and/or Bits, I've fed him more than a few sips of diet Coke... but there weren't cameras hovering three feet from my head the entire time. It's not just celebrities, either. It's the "Star Wars Kid", it's the entire summer camp knowing exactly which fifth-grader still wets the bed. The average American can sniff out the opportunity to humiliate someone else as keenly as a shark detecting a single drop of blood in all that frothing saltwater. The ability to fuck up (and clean up the mess) in relative privacy has become something of a luxury.

---

"Okay, okay," I said, "You ready for your good deed of the day?"

"What's that?", said Betty.

"Delete them. For good. Then forget you ever saw them."

"You sure? Maybe we should tell Ms. Boss."

"No, no way. Mabel's friendly with you, too. You want to wipe that smile right off her face? Maybe get her fired?"

"No, 'course not," said Betty, deftly tapping the Delete key, "They ever show up AGAIN, we'll have a talk. That would be stupid. This was just, I dunno, a horrible mistake."

"Damn," I said, staring at the empty folder, "That was a big black ass."

"It sure was," said Betty.

---

The next day (during which Betty and I frequently turned to one another and whispered, "It was SO BIG!"), I got a call from an attorney I'm friendly with. She told me she was leaving the firm in a few weeks and needed to have some of her documents backed up. "I'll be sorry to see you go," I said. Then, in a flurry of inspiration, "Say... are you taking your chair?"

While visiting her office several years ago, I discovered that Ms. Attorney had a Steelcase LEAP chair. Unlike the ever-present Herman Miller Aeron (looks like Darth Vader's patio furniture and is roughly as comfortable), the LEAP chair is $1,250 worth of precision-crafted, vertebrae-aligning bliss.

"Actually, I'm not," said Ms. Attorney, "It's not even really mine. I found it in a conference room when I first started with the firm. Do you want it?"

"YA-FUCKING-HOO!" shrieked my spine. "YES! Thank you, thank you, thank you!", I said.

Despite being a heathen, I do hold a few wobbly spiritual beliefs. As Jonatha Brooke so nicely put it, "I feel / the steady pull of things that I can't see / and I like it."

I saved someone else's ass from humiliation, degradation and possible termination. Soon, my OWN ass will be parked on a chair which cost more than my first two cars combined.

Me and Mabel... both of our asses will shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.