What do you get when you lock a bunch of lawyers in a hot room and deny them their scheduled lunch and smoking breaks just so you can go home early? Not a fun Friday.Yesterday I drove an hour through what seemed like monsoon rains to attend my continuing legal education seminar at Macon State College. Technically, the satellite location in Atlanta might have been closer to my house, but I would have had to travel with rush hour traffic instead of against it, which would have made the trip into the city just as long as the trip to Macon and a heck of a lot more stressful. Have I mentioned that no one in Atlanta knows how to drive in the rain? No? Well, they don't.
I arrived at the college 20 minutes early, proud that I had managed to make it on time considering the fact that the weather had caused me to drive under the speed limit the entire way. For the last six years, the satellite seminars have always been held in Building K, which is the Long Distance Learning Center or something like that. It was supposed to be held there yesterday as well, at least according to ICLE. Well, I walked through the monsoon rains to the building, my small umbrella providing very little protection along the way, only to find out that the seminar had been moved to the Jones Building. The sign on the door had an arrow pointing left, so I assumed that the Jones Building was the large building that said Something of the Other-Jones Building next door.
Well, it was, and it wasn't. Apparently, only the right half of the building was the Jones Building. The left half was considered an entirely different building, even though it shared the same roof and wasn't separated from the Jones half at all. Of course, if you're like me and you've never attended Macon State College, you would have no way of knowing that little tidbit of information. You would think that, as the numbers on the right/Jones side of the building started at 280, while the numbers on the left/Something of the Other side started at 200, you would have to go to your left to find Room 211, the room where the seminar was located. You, like me, would be wrong.
I went left and found not one but four rooms labeled Room 211. All but one of those rooms was locked, and no one was in the unlocked one. Knowing that I couldn't have been the only person attending the seminar, I wandered around that side of the building for a full 10 minutes before some janitor took pity on me and told me that I wasn't in the Jones building.
"But it says Jones Building above the door outside," I told him in protest.
"Yes, but only half of it is," he responded.
I thought the man had inhaled one too many cleaning products, but that didn't stop me from following the woman he got to show me to my side of the building. Guess where the room was? Right next the bathroom where I had made a quick stop before venturing to the left side of the building. Genius.
Anyway, despite my ability to get lost in a square box, I still made it into the room with five minutes to spare. I got checked in, managed to snag a seat in front, and actually found myself enjoying the seminar when she pushed play five minutes later. For once, the attorneys who spoke were funny and told one entertaining antidote after another. Believe me when I say that that never happens at a seminar, which should have been my first clue that something was amok.
About 12 people came in after me. One of them sat next to me, reeking of cigarette smoke. That's when things started going downhill. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke, and my sinuses started swelling up almost immediately. Luckily, I wasn't too concerned because I had the forethought to bring a bottle of Benadryl with me. I popped a little, pink pill and continued to watch the seminar, drugged but still not upset.
Then the first scheduled break came and went in a nanosecond. That is, it didn't come at all. The seminar played right on through. Not only that, but Segment 1 skipped right on over Segment 2, the part involving direct and cross examination, to Segment 3. Since the lady in charge of pressing play--let's call her Clueless Carrie--said she had downloaded it from the ICLE's site, I just assumed that she downloaded the segments out of order, and we would still get to see Segment 2. I was a little suspicious about the lack of a scheduled break, but given the fact that I had already taken about three bathroom breaks at that point, I wasn't too concerned.
Then it started getting hot in the room, a stuffy, muggy kind of hot. Thirty minutes after the noticeable temperature change, the fan to the projector, which had been running overtime, died, causing our picture to disappear from the TV wall mounted screen. We still had sound, but nothing to look at. Someone had to hunt down Clueless Carrie, who hadn't bothered to stick around or even check up on us to make sure everything was okay. She said tech support had gone home for the day--nice day to do so, huh--so she would try to fix it herself. She rebooted the projector and computer, and that seemed to work...for about 15 minutes.
When the system crashed the second time, one of my fellow attorneys had to hunt her down yet again. When he and Clueless Carrie returned, they came with reinforcements. Let's call them Know Nothing Nelly and Dumb Dora. Like Clueless Carrie, they tried restarting the system, but a reboot didn't work this time so Nelly and Dora left to look for a laptop and a portable projector.
While we waited, I noticed an older male attorney enter the room with a bag of Sun Chips and a scowl on his face. He approached Clueless Carrie and said, "This is some predicament you've got us in, leaving us with a snack machine that only takes exact change." Carrie didn't say anything in return. She just smiled as he sat back down.
I wondered what that was all about, but I put the thought aside when Know Nothing Nelly and Dumb Dora returned with the laptop and portable projector and set them up in a chair at the end of my row, leaving me and the two other people who weren't forced to move just three inches of space to squeeze out of should we need to go to the bathroom. At that point, I, the woman with the world's smallest bladder, was more concerned about what I was going to do the next time nature called on me speed dial. Was I going to crawl over the desk or just stick my butt in the guy behind the projector's face and hope my derriere didn't knock him or the projector over?
I managed to hold off my growling stomach and my full bladder for another hour, but eventually I couldn't take either one anymore. I grabbed my wallet and squeezed through the tiny space by sticking my butt where it really didn't belong (poor guy). Lucky for him, all I had to do was pee and not fart. Anyway, I ran to the bathroom, and then I headed over to the snack machine, hoping to grab a Snickers or some other snack to tie me over to lunch. Despite the fact that I had heard the male attorney say that the machine only took exact change, I still stuck a dollar in the machine like an idiot. I was hoping that it would just let me choose a cheaper snack and eat the difference in price.
Well, it didn't. Not only would it not give me the Reese's Pieces that I had my eye on, it wouldn't give me back my dollar either, no matter how many times I hit the return button. That's when I started getting mad. I looked at the selections and realized why it was that two other people had come back to the room with Sun Chips. They were the one and only snack in the entire machine that cost $1. Everything else cost less.
At that point, I wasn't just mad. I was royally pissed. I didn't want Sun Chips. They smell funny. They crunch. They leave a mess on your fingers. They give me heartburn, and for some reason they only taste good at the beach. I did not want them so I started digging around in my wallet for exact change. After a good five minutes of digging, I was finally able to find one more quarter stuck inside a grocery receipt, which brought my total change to 75 cents, just what I needed for ET's favorite peanut butter candy.
I calmed down for a second, as I tried to put the first quarter in the machine, tried being the operative word. It wouldn't go in, no matter how I lined it up. I squinted my eyes as I tried to peer into the slot. Sure enough, there was something lodged in the slot, and it wasn't coming out anytime sooner. I stopped being calm at that point and started cussing under my breath.
A few seconds later I saw Clueless Carrie walk by so I called out to her. "Excuse me, is there another snack machine in this building."
"No," she responded, as she turned that smirky smile that she had originally turned on the Sun Chips attorney on me. "Why?"
"Well, because the machine only takes exact change, but I can't put exact change in there because someone has stuck something in the change slot."
"Sorry," she said in her slow, Southern drawl, her voice sounding an awful lot like Little Miss Snippy Pants'.
"So what am I supposed to do? I haven't had anything to eat since 6 a.m., and I take it from the fact that it's 1:30 p.m. that we're not going to be allowed to have lunch, even though one is scheduled."
"Well, the attorneys all took a vote and decided to let it play straight through."
"What attorneys? I didn't vote."
"The attorneys who were on time."
"I was on time. In fact, I got here 20 minutes early. If you had bothered to put up signs, I wouldn't have had to wander around for 15 minutes trying to find where you moved us to. Even then, I still got here five minutes before you ever pushed play."
She obviously wasn't listening to me because she repeated what she said earlier, "Well, if you had been on time, you would have gotten to vote."
Any semblance of politeness left me at that point. "But I was on time, thank you very much. Did you not just hear me? You checked me in before you ever turned the thing on."
"Well, the attorneys voted, and they voted not to eat, so I don't know what to tell you."
"Why don't you tell me what you'd be doing right now if I was a diabetic and had to eat? Did you even ask me if I was? Did you ask the 12 people who came in after me?"
"I asked the attorneys who arrived on time."
Realizing that telling her that I was on time wasn't going to do any good, I fought the urge to grab the nearest clock and use it to slap some sense into her. "Well, you're really lucky that you don't have someone in that room going into diabetic shock or worse right now. I haven't had anything to eat in seven hours. I'm already feeling sick. I can't make it another three."
"Well, you should have been on time then."
I was exacerbated. "I...was...on...time," I repeated.
"Just the same, they voted, and I can't change that now."
I crossed my arms, as much as I could holding my overstuffed wallet, and glared at her. "Did they know the snack machine was broken when they voted?"
She neither confirmed nor denied the implied accusation. She just continued with her favorite mantra, "The attorneys who were here on time voted. Majority rules."
"One more time. I...was...on...time," I said slowly, in case Clueless Carrie was equally as slow. Clueless Carrie shrugged her shoulders in response and started walking away. As I was still hungry, I followed her. "Can you at least tell me where the nearest working snack machine is?"
"There's one on the first floor of the Something of the Other building."
"Swell," I snarked.
As I headed towards the elevator, I heard Clueless Carrie call out one more time. "You should have been on time."
Dude, I was an inch away from having to enroll in anger management classes at that point. If I was David Banner, the seams of my shirt would have begun to split as I walked into the elevator. Five minutes later, I managed to find the other snack machine and fish a bag on M&M's out of it. Ordinarily, chocolate calms me down, but not this time. This time I wanted real food and for someone to realize that I WAS ON TIME.
I vowed at that moment that I was going to do something that I never do. I was going to call ICLE the minute the seminar was over and lodge a formal complaint against Clueless Carrie. I also told myself that, from now on, I was only going to attend live seminars where boxed lunches are provided.
After I made my way back Room 211, I tried to go down my row. However, to add insult to injury, my butt didn't clear the chair this time, and the projector went spinning. As you can imagine, I had a room full of people yell "Hey!" at me, like I had somehow meant to do it. I mumbled, "Sorry," and straightened the chair before sitting down.
My day just got worse from that moment forward. When I opened my bag of M&M's, a third of them spilled onto the floor. If I had been at home, I would have followed the 10 second rule and eaten them, but I wasn't at home. I was at a college that had unidentifiable goo on its walls. There was no way I was eating anything off of that floor.
As I ate what remained of the M&M's, I realized that the room was hotter and muggier than it was before. After a few minutes, I began to feel nauseous, and I struggled to keep my measly "lunch" from coming back up. I also noticed that the attorneys who were there before me--that is, the attorneys who voted to forgo lunch--were getting up and leaving, even though there was still two hours or more left to the seminar. I heard one of them say to the other, "I only needed three hours. I'm going home."
My nausea went up another level as a light bulb went off in my head. They voted to skip lunch because they planned on leaving right after lunch to begin with. Those _________! (Fill in the blank with your favorite dirty word. I did in my head and then some.)
Not long after my light bulb moment, Segment 4 ended, but Segment 2 did not start as I had predicted. Half of the attorneys who remained got up and left. In their opinion, the missing segment was ICLE's fault, not theirs, so, despite the fact that we had just gotten through watching the ethics portion of the seminar, they were (unethically) going to call it a day. I, however, needed the ICLE hours represented by Segment 2. I could not just get up and leave, even if I wanted to, because I had to have all 12 hours done by Tuesday or be be in big-time trouble with the bar. Apparently I wasn't the only one because the other half of the room, the lawyers who, coincidentally enough, were the ones who arrived after me and didn't get a vote in the lunchtime poll, stayed. One also got up and went to find Clueless Carrie.
When Clueless Carrie came in, she tried to blame the missing segment on ICLE. She said that she had downloaded it all. She couldn't help it if Segment 2 was missing. Then she played around with computer and saw that Segment 2 was right where it should be. It just didn't play. Do you think she apologized at that point? No. She no more apologized for screwing up the order than she did for letting only a small portion of the attendees decide the lunch fate of everyone else. She did, however, start talking to the guy two seats down from me. He said something to her like, "I don't care one way or the other if I see the missing segment. It's no big deal to me."
She looked right at me as she answered him, "Well, some people aren't as nice as you." She then smirked at me and walked out of the room.
I'm sure my blood pressure was through the roof at that little quip. I no longer wanted the seminar to end so I could eat. I wanted it to end so I could call ICLE. Once Clueless Carrie was securely out of earshot, the room's grumbling began. Everyone started talking about how they would have like to have had lunch, how a lot of them had not even eaten breakfast, and how this seminar was the most disorganized seminar that they had been to. One attorney even said that she was on the board and that she was going to see about doing something about the way we had been treated.
I wish that I could tell you that I enjoyed the rest of the seminar, but I can't. I wanted to. The remaining speaker was a published author who knew Lee Childs and James Patterson, two authors that I read frequently. He kept relating all the writing conferences that he had attended to opening and closing arguments. I would have liked to have gotten the analogy, but it was lost on me thanks to my growling stomach, my headache, the heat-induced nausea, and my anger.
When the seminar finally ended, I called ICLE on the way to my car. The guy I talked to apologized for what had happened and said that, from now on, they would probably prohibit the satellite locations for putting lunchtime up to a vote. I wasn't entirely appeased by his answer, as he also made a lot of excuses for Clueless Carrie's behavior. Apparently her 2:30 p.m. email regarding the so-called majority vote and the fact that no one else had called him yet held more weight that my account of the day. Stupid staff lawyer. No wonder there are so many bad lawyer jokes out there.
I did finally get to eat, ten hours after I ate that piece of cheese toast for breakfast. I was so sick to my stomach, that the food didn't even taste good. Neither did my dinner. I ended up giving most of it to my dogs.
So for all my fellow attorneys out there, if you ever go to an ICLE seminar and suddenly realize that you're enjoying it, run for cover, and run quick. Believe me when I say that it will only be a matter of minutes before the sky starts falling. Oh, and pack a lunch. You and your stomach can thank me later.
