I’ve been told to consistently lie about where my boss is and what he is doing. The standard lie I am supposed to use when someone asks is to say “he’s in a deposition.” And when I say someone, I mean the other lawyers at the firm. You see, my boss often is not in his office, and is unreachable except through text message. I am uncertain where he is, or what he’s doing. I seem to be the proxy signature for him because he doesn’t really like signing anything. (as everyone should know, this is a bad warning sign).
As previously noted, the firm has a new compliance attorney stalking the halls, and they’ve set their sights squarely on my boss. The way my boss has decided to deal with this is doubling down on making sure they are unavailable at the office; always the best course of action to avoid the situation.
Probably the best interaction related to this was when the compliance attorney asked the paralegal where my boss was and they replied he was on the phone in the garage. As it was already late into the morning, the compliance attorney dug in and started asking “so does he normally talk on the phone in the garage? Is he like superman and runs out to the garage like its a phonebooth to protect his identity? Why is he in the garage on his phone?”
Eventually it became a game. The compliance attorney would wander by looking for him. The paralegal would come up with something so obviously a lie that it became somewhat obvious that she had to be fucking with him. Probably the best one I saw was when the compliance attorney came down a very short hallway and asked where our boss was. The paralegal did a double take and said “he literally just went down the hallway… I don’t understand how you could have missed him.” And to add to the whole charade, she stood up, and leaned over to look down the hallway, as if he might be hiding just out of sight. The compliance attorney was boiling, but couldn’t specifically say she was lying, and just stalked off. The moment he was out of sight, we both died laughing.
The paralegal and I had gotten this dance down to an art. She blocked the compliance attorney. I would text our boss and tell him Rainman was on the warpath looking for him. Our boss then would put in an appearance at the office. He made sure to arrange it so that the compliance attorney was likely out for lunch or busy, and our boss would then do a fly through of the office and talk to several of the higher level partners. Just to make sure that everyone saw him. The compliance attorney would then show back up and find out he had just missed our boss, and all of these other people in the office had seen him.. people who were beyond reproach. It must just be his bad luck that he missed him.
It drove the guy absolutely insane, but he couldn’t prove what was going on. Honestly it was a lot of fun watching it happen.