By the time I'd finished school, I knew I'd never make it as an employee and I'd be an awful boss. I was what they called wilful which luckily in those days didn’t result in a prescription for Adderall or Ritalin.
I'd never been good at taking orders nor giving them for that matter, so when I started a law searching company after college I took on a few of my friends, then their friends, and very soon we were a motley crew of 50 twenty-somethings running the biggest legal services company in the country. We worked like a well- oiled machine, all for one and one for all, getting the job done and divvying up the spoils.
And getting the job done wasn’t easy. We worked under tremendous time pressure in registries all over the city, searching through dusty tomes which we first had to prise from the hands of lethargic civil servants. With mobile phones yet to be invented, the information had to be couriered back to the office, typed up and hand-delivered to the solicitor’s office on time for the closing of the sale. Any mistake could cost hundreds of thousands and if the searches didn’t arrive the conveyance couldn’t proceed, resulting in furniture removal vans being turned back and frantic calls to banks for emergency bridging loans.
Though we operated with no real hierarchy the buck stopped with me. So whenever a solicitor came to call asking for the man in charge, it was me who rocked up to greet him, face painted with white clown makeup and bleached hair standing proudly on end. This was in the early 80s when women unless they were secretaries, weren’t so numerous in the legal world so you can imagine the reactions.
We paid huge salaries, bonuses every bank holiday and had wild Christmas parties. We gave employment to junkies fresh out of rehab, our receptionists were inner-city kids with accents to match and on mad busy Fridays, there were always a few joints on the go to keep the dispatchers sane.
We were notorious in Dublin legal circles, and for all the crazy stress involved, sure the craic was 90!
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The prompt is awful boss