People lie to themselves. They just do. I myself have before [usually concerning my true *feelings* (groan) about a girl I couldn't get. "Nah. I'm not into her...(tear)(sniffles)...Nope. Not into her at all."] and, get ready for it, IT'S A DISASTER EVERY TIME.
Now, I must be perfectly clear, it's not that I think people who lie to themselves are stupid (though it's possible) or bad (also possible, and definite if they are willing to hurt others to spare their own discomfort), it's that they're typically weak, in that they can't muster the strength to face reality/facts/the truth. It's easier to believe something that isn't true and can't be true than accept unpleasantness ("Sucks that you're that taken with her, Ajax, but SHE IS NOT INTO YOU.").
I've said it before and will say it always: believing something that isn't true and can't be true is insanity.
As much as it sucks to accept, or at minimum acknowledge, one's impotence, sometimes you don't get to eat the bear; sometimes he eats you. And yelling "I'm eating you, Grizzly!" while he has his chompers in your thigh isn't doing anything to figure out a way to get out of that situation, other than possibly give him (confused) pause if that particular Grizzly comprehends English.
I must admit though, self-delusion is useful for tolerating an untenable situation. That's why people do it. The problem is not while you believe the lie though; it's when the curtain's drawn back and it's revealed. The shock and self-loathing are fairly typically monumental (unless the person doubles down and figuratively screams "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!").
If there's anything I've learned on this marble, it's that nobody likes to feel bad about themselves and nobody, readily, likes to acknowledge that they're powerless.
The true downside with lying to yourself is that by doing so, you're accepting the crap situation that got you to lie to yourself in the first place. It's, ultimately, a failure of assessment. You're going to keep losing if you're playing a game you can't win. Keep playing if self-flagellation is your thing or you legitimately believe you have a chance, but call a spade a spade or find a way out of the game.
All this is a preface to what I'm up to these days. I might sound a bit melancholy (don't fret...jokes forthcoming), but better to acknowledge than delude.
Awareness brings the possibility of control.
_____________________________
I am performing Document Review. Allow me to explain to those not in the legal biz:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Document Review is where dreams and aspirations go, if not to die, then to hibernate.
What is it? I can't give my particular situation because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. But I can give an example.
The Gulf Oil Spill.
Again, I am in no way involved in that, but of course BP is getting sued by a billionty people. The courts will hear motions from litigants. To figure out what happened, there's a fact-finding stage to start called "discovery".
The plaintiffs will make motions to acquire all pertinent, relevant documentation from BP. BP must (MUST) comply in good faith. If there were a document that said "Let's blow up the rig! Lolz!", they would have to turn it over. Courts seriously expect defendants to do that.
Since the Smoking Gun so rarely exists, the proof of malfeasance has to be pieced together from subtler sources. Plaintiffs will cast a wide net in their discovery requests. Better to have and not need than need and not have.
So the court will say, "BP, turn over every document (email, spreadsheet, slide presentation, telegram, etc) that involves oil rig maintenance in general, anything about that rig 'The Deepwater Horizon' in particular, and, what the hell, anything you got on the Kennedy Assassination."
BP is a massive multinational. That production order will end up being millions, if not tens of millions, of documents, each ranging from one to several thousand pages.
That is where Document Review comes in.
BP has lawyers. They can't look over that much information. There are not enough of them and their hourly rates are too expensive to have them doing that. They farm it out to cheaper labor. What kind of cheaper labor?
They can't just give it to high school graduates. A judge wouldn't believe they were acting in good faith if they did that. Also, there would be a chance the uneducated would let a key document slide through or perhaps sell it to the other side. No, they need people with training and something to lose.
That's why JDs, not bar-sworn lawyers, but people that graduated from law school, are required for document review. They have a legal education but can't take clients and practice because they haven't passed a bar exam and been admitted to practice anywhere. But they have an advanced degree that most other career fields will avoid like the plague since it's typically assumed that a) JDs in a non-legal field will be argumentative pains in the ass and b) they will leave the second they pass a bar exam and get a job at a firm.
Sadder than JDs though, in their own special way, are bar-sworn attorneys who do document review. They haven't been able to latch on to a firm (as the link above explains, a great many graduates will be having a very, very difficult time finding steady employment as lawyers) or they are burned out from practicing. JDs have the hope in their mind that they might be able to improve their station if they can just get sworn in. Doc Review lawyers don't have even that. It is a treading water occupation. Always has been and always will be.
What makes document review maddening, and therefore what makes so many document reviewers (that I've seen, at least) lie to themselves, is that it is dummy-proofed to require no more than a kindergardner to perform it.
Colors and shapes. If you can handle colors and shapes, you can do kindergarden and you can do document review.
All the documents, if not digital already (like emails and computer docs) get scanned and then all get run through a computer filter. The filter looks for key words, in this instance, the word "Rig" and maybe "maintenance" and definitely "Deep Water Horizon" (and maybe, what the hell, "Kennedy Assassination"). The filter will assign those words colors or a color, signifying "Hey! This is probably Relevant!" They like to make Doc Review festive, so let's say those get coded Chartreuse!
As a document reviewer, the first stage is called "First Level Review" (FLR). All you're supposed to do as an FLRer is see if anything's relevant. That means they give you a set/"batch" of documents, you pull down on the scroll bar on your computer for each document, and see if chartreuse(!) flashes past your eyes. You're not really reading. You're just looking for the color. Sure, it doesn't hurt to glance at the gist of the documents, but you're not there to make yourself a roughneck foreman on a gulf rig; you're there to pump these documents to the next stage of document review, Redaction. When you get through a document and there's no chartreuse, you code it "not relevant" and move to the next document. When you get one that is relevant, you have to check it for that next stage. Does it have material that should be redacted?
How to explain redaction?
Out of the unfathomable amount of information that is in the relevant documents, there is an equally unfathomable amount if proprietary information on non-related subjects that could seriously damage BP. Say BP had invented the only drill of its kind in the world that would open up unexplored areas and revolutionize their business. And what if someone suggested in a company email they put it on an oil rig or even The Deepwater Horizon in the future? BP doesn't want its drill design or plans for use or even the knowledge of its existence getting out to competitors. Hell, a competitor might be behind a litigant solely to data mine through discovery.
To prevent BP from, justifiably, refusing to comply with discovery, courts let defendants redact proprietary information from relevant documents.
FLRers are given a redaction list. Once they spot chartreuse(!) they pay a bit closer attention to the doc and skim it looking for keywords for redaction. If they find those words, they mark it "relevant" and "redaction needed" and move to the next doc (or they mark it "redaction not needed" if it isn't). The FLRed document sets/batches with docs that need redaction go to Redactors.
Redacting is shapes, specifically rectangles. Using your mouse, when you look over a document, you draw an opaque box over all the non-relevant, and specifically redactible, material. If an employee mentions how great his lunch was on the rig, you don't redact the part about the lunch. It's not important. But if the email said that during lunch on the rig it dawned on him that the experimental drill would be great for yadayadayada, you sure as hell redact the part about the drill.
Redacting is censorship. Think of WWII letter that would arrive home with Dear --- and Love --- and everything else was blacked out for security purposes. They didn't burn the letter or keep it from the sweetheart, they protected what they thought was secret.
Redaction can make documents indecipherable or mostly pointless. And that's fine. Because so long as a relevant term is visible on the page, the doc has to be turned over, even if the word "rig" in a sea of "redacted" does the plaintiffs no good. That's the system.
Quality Control (QC) is the next step. QC reviews the docs that FLR said weren't relevant or need redaction to make sure they are correctly coded. They do the same thing for the redacted items to make sure nothing was missed nor that too much was redacted nor that relevant materials were mistakenly redacted. If there was a mistake, they correct it by coding and re-redacting.
Here's a little secret: people that went to law school consider themselves to be very intelligent. Just like anything else, some are, and some are not. But they all think they are. They think they are far too smart for such a menial job. Far too smart to be doing kindergarden work. Far too smart to be doing kindergarden work when they spent over 6 figures on their education. Far too smart to be being paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds.
This causes a double problem for QCers. It means that many times FLRers and Redactors hit "$&*! This!" mode and code the docs or redact them willynilly, because gawddammituniverseIamnotsuppos
When you are in the same position as people who have already burned out, and you have to correct them, it's not a good place to be.
The turnover is high.
I got "promoted" to redaction, and then QC, in 41 days. "Promotion" does not mean more pay, it just means more responsibility and expectations. When I got moved to QC, I asked what the benefit was, and they told me that I could work more hours. And that as the project wound down, I would be among the last to be fired.
The cognitive dissonance that working in QC causes is startling. Some (Group A) seem to pretend they work for BP, discussing minutiae on how best to protect the company through perfect redaction/coding. They willfully lose sight of the fact that a) whether they redact the preceding article or not is of no importance because b) the equally burned out document reviewer on the litigants' side, having to actually read all of that gibberish, is not paying attention since c) there are tens or hundreds of millions of documents and so d) it will take a decade or so to sift through all that before e) the lawsuit settles anyway.
Some of the others (Group B) hear how ridiculous Group A are, and shake their heads, and then I catch them (Group B) saying they work for the law firm. Law firms that do document review are typically huge, and therefore prestigious. Working for them would be a great, big feather in the cap. The only problem is, we don't work for them, and we never could work for them. The best law firms don't hire document reviewers because document reviewers can't get jobs, especially not with good law firms.
We all work for temp agencies that funnel people to doc review. Hiring, firing, and dealing with people just quitting is much easier that way.
The management at document review take advantage of all of that self-delusion. I don't mean that in any nefarious way. It is what it is. Overtime is not additional pay. So management constantly encourages people to work extra hours. The self-deluders think they are doing their part to save BP or working hours appropriate for an associate at the firm.
Associates at good firms do routinely work 10-16 hours a day and come in on weekends. Associates at good firms get paid like associates at good firms though. Again, we get paid like assistant managers at McDonalds.
If you're not deluded, the only reason that you're working extra hours is because you need the money, plain and simple. The deluded brag to each other about how many hours they're working.
A junior manager or two, promoted up from the cubicles to inspire us, has tried to test me out. "You're coming in this weekend, right? You're only at fifty hours so far." My laughter as I walked out for the weekend has confused them.
I worked at McDonalds as a 15 year old. I shook my head at the others who would jockey and compete to get promoted there. I knew I was meant for bigger and better things, just like now.
Good thing I'm not kidding myself?
Now, I must be perfectly clear, it's not that I think people who lie to themselves are stupid (though it's possible) or bad (also possible, and definite if they are willing to hurt others to spare their own discomfort), it's that they're typically weak, in that they can't muster the strength to face reality/facts/the truth. It's easier to believe something that isn't true and can't be true than accept unpleasantness ("Sucks that you're that taken with her, Ajax, but SHE IS NOT INTO YOU.").
I've said it before and will say it always: believing something that isn't true and can't be true is insanity.
As much as it sucks to accept, or at minimum acknowledge, one's impotence, sometimes you don't get to eat the bear; sometimes he eats you. And yelling "I'm eating you, Grizzly!" while he has his chompers in your thigh isn't doing anything to figure out a way to get out of that situation, other than possibly give him (confused) pause if that particular Grizzly comprehends English.
I must admit though, self-delusion is useful for tolerating an untenable situation. That's why people do it. The problem is not while you believe the lie though; it's when the curtain's drawn back and it's revealed. The shock and self-loathing are fairly typically monumental (unless the person doubles down and figuratively screams "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!").
If there's anything I've learned on this marble, it's that nobody likes to feel bad about themselves and nobody, readily, likes to acknowledge that they're powerless.
The true downside with lying to yourself is that by doing so, you're accepting the crap situation that got you to lie to yourself in the first place. It's, ultimately, a failure of assessment. You're going to keep losing if you're playing a game you can't win. Keep playing if self-flagellation is your thing or you legitimately believe you have a chance, but call a spade a spade or find a way out of the game.
All this is a preface to what I'm up to these days. I might sound a bit melancholy (don't fret...jokes forthcoming), but better to acknowledge than delude.
Awareness brings the possibility of control.
_____________________________
I am performing Document Review. Allow me to explain to those not in the legal biz:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Document Review is where dreams and aspirations go, if not to die, then to hibernate.
What is it? I can't give my particular situation because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. But I can give an example.
The Gulf Oil Spill.
Again, I am in no way involved in that, but of course BP is getting sued by a billionty people. The courts will hear motions from litigants. To figure out what happened, there's a fact-finding stage to start called "discovery".
The plaintiffs will make motions to acquire all pertinent, relevant documentation from BP. BP must (MUST) comply in good faith. If there were a document that said "Let's blow up the rig! Lolz!", they would have to turn it over. Courts seriously expect defendants to do that.
Since the Smoking Gun so rarely exists, the proof of malfeasance has to be pieced together from subtler sources. Plaintiffs will cast a wide net in their discovery requests. Better to have and not need than need and not have.
So the court will say, "BP, turn over every document (email, spreadsheet, slide presentation, telegram, etc) that involves oil rig maintenance in general, anything about that rig 'The Deepwater Horizon' in particular, and, what the hell, anything you got on the Kennedy Assassination."
BP is a massive multinational. That production order will end up being millions, if not tens of millions, of documents, each ranging from one to several thousand pages.
That is where Document Review comes in.
BP has lawyers. They can't look over that much information. There are not enough of them and their hourly rates are too expensive to have them doing that. They farm it out to cheaper labor. What kind of cheaper labor?
They can't just give it to high school graduates. A judge wouldn't believe they were acting in good faith if they did that. Also, there would be a chance the uneducated would let a key document slide through or perhaps sell it to the other side. No, they need people with training and something to lose.
That's why JDs, not bar-sworn lawyers, but people that graduated from law school, are required for document review. They have a legal education but can't take clients and practice because they haven't passed a bar exam and been admitted to practice anywhere. But they have an advanced degree that most other career fields will avoid like the plague since it's typically assumed that a) JDs in a non-legal field will be argumentative pains in the ass and b) they will leave the second they pass a bar exam and get a job at a firm.
Sadder than JDs though, in their own special way, are bar-sworn attorneys who do document review. They haven't been able to latch on to a firm (as the link above explains, a great many graduates will be having a very, very difficult time finding steady employment as lawyers) or they are burned out from practicing. JDs have the hope in their mind that they might be able to improve their station if they can just get sworn in. Doc Review lawyers don't have even that. It is a treading water occupation. Always has been and always will be.
What makes document review maddening, and therefore what makes so many document reviewers (that I've seen, at least) lie to themselves, is that it is dummy-proofed to require no more than a kindergardner to perform it.
Colors and shapes. If you can handle colors and shapes, you can do kindergarden and you can do document review.
All the documents, if not digital already (like emails and computer docs) get scanned and then all get run through a computer filter. The filter looks for key words, in this instance, the word "Rig" and maybe "maintenance" and definitely "Deep Water Horizon" (and maybe, what the hell, "Kennedy Assassination"). The filter will assign those words colors or a color, signifying "Hey! This is probably Relevant!" They like to make Doc Review festive, so let's say those get coded Chartreuse!
As a document reviewer, the first stage is called "First Level Review" (FLR). All you're supposed to do as an FLRer is see if anything's relevant. That means they give you a set/"batch" of documents, you pull down on the scroll bar on your computer for each document, and see if chartreuse(!) flashes past your eyes. You're not really reading. You're just looking for the color. Sure, it doesn't hurt to glance at the gist of the documents, but you're not there to make yourself a roughneck foreman on a gulf rig; you're there to pump these documents to the next stage of document review, Redaction. When you get through a document and there's no chartreuse, you code it "not relevant" and move to the next document. When you get one that is relevant, you have to check it for that next stage. Does it have material that should be redacted?
How to explain redaction?
Out of the unfathomable amount of information that is in the relevant documents, there is an equally unfathomable amount if proprietary information on non-related subjects that could seriously damage BP. Say BP had invented the only drill of its kind in the world that would open up unexplored areas and revolutionize their business. And what if someone suggested in a company email they put it on an oil rig or even The Deepwater Horizon in the future? BP doesn't want its drill design or plans for use or even the knowledge of its existence getting out to competitors. Hell, a competitor might be behind a litigant solely to data mine through discovery.
To prevent BP from, justifiably, refusing to comply with discovery, courts let defendants redact proprietary information from relevant documents.
FLRers are given a redaction list. Once they spot chartreuse(!) they pay a bit closer attention to the doc and skim it looking for keywords for redaction. If they find those words, they mark it "relevant" and "redaction needed" and move to the next doc (or they mark it "redaction not needed" if it isn't). The FLRed document sets/batches with docs that need redaction go to Redactors.
Redacting is shapes, specifically rectangles. Using your mouse, when you look over a document, you draw an opaque box over all the non-relevant, and specifically redactible, material. If an employee mentions how great his lunch was on the rig, you don't redact the part about the lunch. It's not important. But if the email said that during lunch on the rig it dawned on him that the experimental drill would be great for yadayadayada, you sure as hell redact the part about the drill.
Redacting is censorship. Think of WWII letter that would arrive home with Dear --- and Love --- and everything else was blacked out for security purposes. They didn't burn the letter or keep it from the sweetheart, they protected what they thought was secret.
Redaction can make documents indecipherable or mostly pointless. And that's fine. Because so long as a relevant term is visible on the page, the doc has to be turned over, even if the word "rig" in a sea of "redacted" does the plaintiffs no good. That's the system.
Quality Control (QC) is the next step. QC reviews the docs that FLR said weren't relevant or need redaction to make sure they are correctly coded. They do the same thing for the redacted items to make sure nothing was missed nor that too much was redacted nor that relevant materials were mistakenly redacted. If there was a mistake, they correct it by coding and re-redacting.
Here's a little secret: people that went to law school consider themselves to be very intelligent. Just like anything else, some are, and some are not. But they all think they are. They think they are far too smart for such a menial job. Far too smart to be doing kindergarden work. Far too smart to be doing kindergarden work when they spent over 6 figures on their education. Far too smart to be being paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds.
This causes a double problem for QCers. It means that many times FLRers and Redactors hit "$&*! This!" mode and code the docs or redact them willynilly, because gawddammituniverseIamnotsuppos
When you are in the same position as people who have already burned out, and you have to correct them, it's not a good place to be.
The turnover is high.
I got "promoted" to redaction, and then QC, in 41 days. "Promotion" does not mean more pay, it just means more responsibility and expectations. When I got moved to QC, I asked what the benefit was, and they told me that I could work more hours. And that as the project wound down, I would be among the last to be fired.
The cognitive dissonance that working in QC causes is startling. Some (Group A) seem to pretend they work for BP, discussing minutiae on how best to protect the company through perfect redaction/coding. They willfully lose sight of the fact that a) whether they redact the preceding article or not is of no importance because b) the equally burned out document reviewer on the litigants' side, having to actually read all of that gibberish, is not paying attention since c) there are tens or hundreds of millions of documents and so d) it will take a decade or so to sift through all that before e) the lawsuit settles anyway.
Some of the others (Group B) hear how ridiculous Group A are, and shake their heads, and then I catch them (Group B) saying they work for the law firm. Law firms that do document review are typically huge, and therefore prestigious. Working for them would be a great, big feather in the cap. The only problem is, we don't work for them, and we never could work for them. The best law firms don't hire document reviewers because document reviewers can't get jobs, especially not with good law firms.
We all work for temp agencies that funnel people to doc review. Hiring, firing, and dealing with people just quitting is much easier that way.
The management at document review take advantage of all of that self-delusion. I don't mean that in any nefarious way. It is what it is. Overtime is not additional pay. So management constantly encourages people to work extra hours. The self-deluders think they are doing their part to save BP or working hours appropriate for an associate at the firm.
Associates at good firms do routinely work 10-16 hours a day and come in on weekends. Associates at good firms get paid like associates at good firms though. Again, we get paid like assistant managers at McDonalds.
If you're not deluded, the only reason that you're working extra hours is because you need the money, plain and simple. The deluded brag to each other about how many hours they're working.
A junior manager or two, promoted up from the cubicles to inspire us, has tried to test me out. "You're coming in this weekend, right? You're only at fifty hours so far." My laughter as I walked out for the weekend has confused them.
I worked at McDonalds as a 15 year old. I shook my head at the others who would jockey and compete to get promoted there. I knew I was meant for bigger and better things, just like now.
Good thing I'm not kidding myself?
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