NoJoMo Day #20 - Best Boss in The Long and Winding Road

Day Twenty: Who is the best boss you’ve ever had?

Wow! Another hard one. I have been fortunate to have had several really wonderful bosses that I’ve loved. I also had one who was absolutely horrible so maybe that is an upcoming prompt. But I’ll stick to today’s question. My current boss is just wonderful. I can’t say enough good things about him. My boss at the last law firm I worked at was also wonderful. In fact, I worked for several memorable, fabulous attorneys there. But this time, I will actually choose one boss to write about. And that would be Judy, an attorney I worked for in New Orleans.

Judy was (still is) close to my age. She had a very outgoing personality – she was vivacious and funny and witty and full of life. Although we worked for a large law firm, she was more or less in a private partnership with a good friend of hers, Deborah. The two of them practiced what used to be known as med mal (medical malpractice law) and then transitioned into being called healthcare law. Deborah was a strong, domineering little woman who probably weighed about 85 lbs. She was forceful and aggressive in her struggle to compete with the male hierarchy that then prevailed at law firms. A strong woman paving the way for other women behind her. But her personal life was a mess. She had made two really bad marriages and was struggling through the end of the second one during the time that I worked for Judy. If you worked for Judy, you also sort of worked for Deborah. Just as Deborah’s assistant sort of worked for Judy too.

The two of them together were a dynamic team. The four of us – Judy, Deborah, Deborah’s assistant Jenny, and I – were also a lively, busy, crazy team. Other assistants in the firm were envious of me and Jenny because we worked for such funny, good women and it was obvious that we worked hard but laughed a lot and had a good time too. We would go across the street to the Hyatt Regency and sit in their lounge with a bottle of champagne and work on deposition prep or some such work. Judy and Deborah would take Jenny and me out to lunch at the best, most prestigious New Orleans restaurants. Things were never dull. They represented a number of hospitals in the city and the cases we got were always interesting. One that I’ve never forgotten was a woman who lived close to me, who went to the ER because she felt that she was having a heart attack. Three times over the course of 5 days, she went to the ER and each time, they ran tests and sent her home, telling her she was not having a heart attack. And then she dropped dead.

But when it really got crazy was when there were incidents at one of the psychiatric hospitals we represented. The director of the facility was a bit of a nut case herself and she was on the phone to Judy and Deborah every day. OMG some of the incidents that happened at that facility! Like I said, never a dull moment. We’d be in the middle of something and all of a sudden Judy and/or Deborah would have to drop everything and go out to the facility to take witness statements in the wake of an incident.

One of the most memorable times was when we changed law firms. When I first started working for them, it was a relatively small firm – about 30 attorneys. As often happens with law firms, there was a lot of internal strife among the partners and associates. The details of this one particular situation are too complicated to go into now, but the end result was the Judy and Deborah decided to leave the firm – they got an offer from this huge law firm that we ended up at, but for their own good reasons, they didn’t tell the managing partner of the current law firm. Instead, we packed up and moved out of that office in the middle of the night, to avoid having management seize our files. That was pretty exciting and dramatic. Our husbands were all with us, hauling boxes down 43 floors in the elevator to our waiting cars, and we were all on edge the whole time, afraid one of the other attorneys would come by the office to burn some midnight oil, and discover us absconding with all our files, plants, personal pictures, etc.!

Judy could be a bit of a diva. She and her husband had each been raised in prominent upper middle class families. Her husband was a well known college basketball coach. They had a housekeeper who also was nanny to their two little boys. Her name was Irma Lee. I got to know her very well because I was at Judy’s house a lot – she was a gem. Then at Christmas time two years in a row, Judy hired Sarah (who was in high school one year, and then home from college for Christmas break the next year) to take over watching the kids and helping around the house with Irma Lee. Judy paid Sarah very well, but it was a little challenging for Sarah because her hours weren’t well defined; both Judy and her husband were used to having hired help around so one or both of them would come home and Sarah assumed that meant she could go home, but they expected her to stay; Sarah, on the other hand, wasn’t used to hanging around to help with the house and the kids while the parents were there.

Judy had a big influence on me. I picked up a lot of her mannerisms, and her confidence. After I’d been working for her for a few years, I was a different person – more outgoing, more confident and self assured, and I displayed my sense of humor a lot more often. I carried a lot of what I learned from her, with me when I left New Orleans, moved to Seattle and interviewed for jobs here. To this day, I’m reminded of her whenever I say certain things or display my confidence at work.

A few years ago, she and I reunited on Facebook, but we didn’t stay in contact with each other for very long. That’s the way it often is when you reunite with an old friend years later. But I’ll never forget her and I’ll always be grateful for the years that I worked for her.