Abandoned Property
art by Jameson Currier
Pastel and ink on paper
20190417001
Abandoned Property
by Jameson Currier
There is a woman at the Company I work for who handles abandoned property, searching for lost funds that are due the Company that have never been received. She is not very successful at it. She locates the funds but doesn’t know how to fill out and file the claims or even type a cover letter without typos. Every six months or so I get hysterical emails asking about the status of the claims which may be somewhere on my desk or lost or given to another paralegal, a lazy young twentysomething woman who thinks she doesn’t need to do any work that I ask for help on. The reason for the hysterical email is that the manager of the woman who is mishandling abandoned property claims is inquiring about the lack of receipts received from unclaimed funds; it is not as successful as in previous years. The reason why I have shifted this work to the lazy young twentysomething female paralegal who won’t do this work is because I am too busy to do it myself, overwhelmed with responsibilities well above my pay grade and bogged down with the minutia well below it that no one else in the Company wants to do. No executive in my Company wants to make a decision and no employee can fill out a form, let alone type the name of the Company into the first line of any sort of application, as if they were working in a foreign land for a Company with a name they cannot pronounce, instead of a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.
I complained about my work load to my supervising attorney, a fortysomething superwoman corporate climber, who is supposed to be my manager, by asking for a buyout—a severance package of a certain number weeks of pay based on the twenty-plus years I had been with the Company and which was being offered to employees in other departments. I had spent three hectic, relentless months making decisions about the Company’s operations in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, England, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and other foreign locations that no one else wanted to address and I was burned out. I offered to wait to receive a buyout package until after I had trained a successor to replace me in my job, but at the time I asked for the buyout my superwoman managing attorney was so hell bent on climbing higher up the corporate ladder that she did not supply me with an answer about a buyout and, instead, deflected the issue to a soon-to-be-retiring highly compensated attorney who was her boss, who called me into his office and told me I shouldn’t run away from the job that no one else wanted to do and that I could work part time hours if I wanted, which was a subtle way of saying, No, we will not give you a buyout and we want you to work harder in less hours for less money. Meanwhile even after the highly compensated soon-to-be retiring attorney retired from the Company, revenues at the Company continued to tumble, floors were rented out to subtenants, whole groups of departments were offered buyouts, and I continued to make decisions about the Company’s legal status in foreign jurisdictions because none of the highly compensated attorneys in the department wanted to be bothered with such complicated international matters. I continued to be excluded from all offers of buyouts and which is why I continued to receive the hysterical emails about the status of the unclaimed property refunds. The Company needs to find revenue from somewhere to fund all of the salaries and bonuses of its highly compensated executives and attorneys, even when they are unable to locate their own missing checks.
The woman who is not good at collecting abandoned property refunds replaced a woman who was moderately successful at it who replaced a woman who was spectacular at it but no one liked because she was forceful, bossy, spoke up for herself, and was overprotective of her boss. She found more than a half a million dollars in unclaimed funds and then was offered a buyout. Her replacement can claim refunds of more than a million dollars, in part, because I pursued an unclaimed tax refund from a state agency which required a bond to be put into place. I won an award for pursuing that claim, a citation from the Chairman of the Company, which I offered to share with the moderately successful unclaimed property seeker and a formerly employed female paralegal who was not lazy but too ambitious for my superwoman supervising attorney to manage properly (and so she quit). The office manager of my department had arranged the nomination for me and my co-workers to be considered for the citation. My superwoman supervising attorney reviews all the public and internal communications of our Corporate Communications department and when she learned that an “unclaimed property team” was being recognized and honored, she sent another attorney to speak with me and ask me who the “unclaimed property team” was since all the attorneys were convinced that there was no such official or legitimate team in place at the Company. No one even seemed to understand that the almost-million dollar check I had gotten the Company was because someone had not done their job in the first place and had not opened their own mail so that the first check sent to the Company could be received and deposited.
My superwoman supervising attorney sits so high up on the corporate ladder that there is a lack of oxygen that makes her think her staff are maids. She refers to the work I do as “housekeeping,” and doesn’t like to be bothered about any problem I might surface, even stating in meetings where I am in attendance and I bring up a matter that needs her attention, “I was hoping not to be bothered by this.” In emails she no longer refers to me by name, because the lack of oxygen from sitting so high up with her ass in the air has made her not only forget my name but forget to breathe, so I am only referred to by a title I had before the title I have now, which is not much different than the title before because the word “senior” is really a misnomer unless you are referring to my age. I still claim to have the worst job in this Company.
The attorney who asked me the question about the existence of an unclaimed property team didn’t know that I worked on obtaining unclaimed property refunds, or if she did, she did not remember it, because this particular attorney has a habit of not remembering anything. She will ask a question, listen to the answer, and five minutes later when she is back in her office, she has forgotten the answer and will call me on the phone and ask the question again. This is a cycle that never ends. Questions surface. Answers are forgotten. It’s a mystery to me why my superwoman supervising attorney won’t fire her for her forgetfulness, but then such a dismissal would look as bad on her record as it would be damaging for the forgetful attorney. But then again, the lazy young twentysomething female paralegal works for the forgetful attorney, which is probably why she is more lazy than the other employees at my Company who cannot fill out forms or the executives who cannot make decisions.
My superwoman supervising attorney once told me that I should not be doing work that was not legal related since I worked in the legal department. At the time I was working on a project for the tax department, which is about as legal as you can get. It was an odd statement for her to make, given that she spends the majority of her time doing non-legal work, particularly making charts and timetables of her staff’s responsibilities which all seem to omit her input or presence. My superwoman supervising attorney believes that she can do everyone’s job better than he or she can do it; hence she has earned the title of superwoman. She also has the ability to spot a missing comma from a mile away, so she spends a great deal of time editing non legal work generated by other, non-legal departments, often sending documents and presentations back to the sender with her pencil marks and comments in the margins. One weekend she reformatted a document I was working on that did not need reformatting. She spent three hours doing this instead of spending time with her young children. She shaded rows with different colors and used different fonts to make the document look more special than merely being a bland list of names of executives and their titles.
My superwoman supervising attorney used to sit in the glass enclosed office opposite the one I sit in, which meant all day long I would have to see her non-legal superpowers in action and it would make me miserable. Whenever I needed advice on a legal matter, I would walk across the tiny space that separated us to her office and ask her a question. She would cringe and snap at me because I was not high enough on her corporate ladder for her to hear though I sat right outside her office. She only wanted to speak with executives who were higher up on the corporate ladder than she was, particularly if it meant handling matters that related to their compensation. One year during her climb to the top of the ladder, she was responsible for giving herself four raises.
It was during this climb to the top that I realized that my superwoman supervising attorney might be bipolar. One day she was mean and snappy, then suddenly she was friendly and wearing makeup and touching employees politely on their shoulders. The Company hired a consultant who came in and helped her become a better executive, but unfortunately the consultant did not help her hone her superpowers to become a better manager or even a better human being, though I did see a few attempts of her wearing earrings. When my superwoman supervising attorney finally made it to the top of her ladder, she was able to move to an office on another floor. If she hadn’t been officially diagnosed as bipolar by a respectful member of the medical profession, then someone had prescribed some great type of herbal tea to go along with her promotions and relocations, because now she only spoke in a slow, soft whisper, as if it was not worth the effort to shout to someone so low on the ground. Her assistant is the office manager who nominated me for the award for unclaimed property refunds and who spends most of her time organizing blood drives and charity events and telling anyone who will listen stories about her siblings. In case the dysfunction is not apparent, the superwoman supervising attorney and the superfluous office manager for my department sit on a different floor from the lowly compensated staff and the highly compensated attorneys who are their direct reports. I am grateful to say that I am grateful in this case to consider myself as abandoned property.
But I have strayed from the woman who is unsuccessful at claiming unclaimed property refunds. There is little thought that she will be fired from her job for not obtaining the unclaimed property refunds because the Company faces many prior legal claims from minority employees and doesn’t want to generate another one because of money it was not able to collect the first time it was sent to someone in the Company. Her boss is a woman who is unable to manage the financial services of the Company, in part because everyone is now more focused on security and brand rather than generating revenues, though she will do her best to make the woman who is unsuccessful at claiming unclaimed property feel miserable. She will even call me on the phone and make me feel miserable, even though I downloaded the responsibility for the unclaimed property funds to the lazy young twentysomething female paralegal who leaves work early with the excuse, “I don’t have any work to do so I am going to leave early!” The lazy young twentysomething female paralegal who leaves work early, however, will likely be applauded and promoted by the attorney who cannot remember anything because she will likely forget that she has a paralegal who is not sitting at her desk until she is reminded about it and will sign a form to give her a promotion. The Company will not offer me a buyout because they hope my request will be forgotten or overlooked or abandoned, the way checks that arrive in the mail are lost. That’s the way things work here. Things are lost. Never found. Or forgotten. Hope is nothing but abandoned property.
