Sticking it to The Man

another productive day at work...i either need to sleep with the HotDocs manual under my pillow and hope i learn it inside, backwards, forwards and out through osmosis, or start insisting to people that the information i request is TIME SENSITIVE. i've been sitting around since 8:40 this morning, waiting for someone to get back to me on how to fix my footer in an expungement form. in the meantime, i have become a solitaire player extraordinaire; i have won about 35 games so far, 20 of which were under 2 minutes. on the one hand, i feel guilty because i'm being funded by the government to help the low-income community and fight poverty, not sit in my office and play solitaire. on the other hand, it's not my fault that i'm stuck on one part, and my supervisor has run out of things for me to do. plus it's awesome to think that government funding (and probably taxpayers' hard-earned money, oops) is helping me improve my speed-solitaire skills. you're welcome, america. on a completely unrelated note, i've had the thong song stuck in my head all day, and i've noticed that i play faster on solitaire when i'm singing the song in my head. don't ask.

i've noticed a trend where random people with legal issues somehow get MY extension number and ask me for legal advice. i have no idea how these people are directed to me, specifically, but it's kind of fun to listen to their stories. for instance, today i spoke to a poor, distraught man from minot, ND, by way of france. the first thing he asked me was if i spoke french, and i had to disappoint him by saying that i could only speak spanish, and very brokenly at that. i've always wanted to learn french (along with about 8 other languages), and i'd never wanted to be a polyglot more in my life than at that moment. anyhow, he explained his situation to me in his broken, heavily accented english, while i asked about 29384723 (probably stupid) questions because i couldn't really understand what he was saying. something about a green card and being stuck in france after visiting his sick mother and not having an address in the states because, and i quote verbatim, "napoleon has died." i was very confused and on the verge of laughter because he sounded so forlorn, and i thought it was ridiculous that this frenchman was mourning the death of a compatriot who died over 200 years ago and probably had no bearing on his inability to return to the states. turns out that "napoleon" was the friend he had been living with in the states, and his death was the reason why our frenchman couldn't return. oops, good thing i held in my laughter...i eventually had to forward him to another law org./firm, but for some reason talking to him made my day.

now i'm sitting here updating my blog, even though i'm pretty sure no one reads it. it gives me something to do, though, and since i'm typing away on my computer, everyone who walks by my office thinks i'm hard at work and putting those government dollars to good use. yay.