The End of Something.

I worked at Weil, Gotshal as a temp proofreader on the graveyard shift at the tail end of the 1980s for I think about a year, though it could have been more than that or less. Sometimes things in the past that lasted only a short time persist in my memory as an epoch. Weil, Gotshal was in the GM Building, FAO Schwartz was on the street level. I’m not sure if they are (were) still in that location. I’m pretty sure it’s not called the GM Building anymore.

This was when the big New York white shoe law firms were high on the hog, hiring mobs of temps 24 hours a day, as often as not to sit around smoking cigarettes and gabbing or napping. The proofreaders at Weil, Gotshal worked in a room separated by a glass wall from the large word processing center, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. (Non-smokers, there were few, worked in a conference room down the hall.) The “lead proofreader” was smart and very funny but she was a holy terror, possibly psychotic, not to be crossed. It seemed like most of what we proofed were bankruptcy documents, thousands and thousands of pages of them. I remember especially the Eastern Airlines bankruptcy. I guess all those bankruptcies should have cued us in to how precarious it all was and that the end of our cushy deal was imminent. It didn’t.

One of the guys I worked with and I started to feel a bit exploited by our agency, which was taking a big chunk of our hourly rate for doing very little, we thought, since our temp assignments were “permanent.” So we cooked up a scheme where we would go to a competing temp agency and ask for a much higher rate. We proposed $22.62/hour—I can’t remember how we got that number, but we were making $15 with our current agency. I think the scheme involved then recruiting the rest of the gang for a lower rate but still higher than what they were making. Anyway, the new agency bit. However, within weeks the early 90s recession came, the wild days of easy money were over at the big law firms, and Weil, Gotshal canceled all perma-temp bookings. Our scheme hadn’t accounted for the impermanence of all things.

I had just separated from my boyfriend, signed a lease on an apartment in Boerum Hill, a sketchy neighborhood, but a nice apartment that I could have afforded on my newly jacked up paycheck. I couldn’t of course afford it with only a couple temp assignments a week. Just then, I got an offer in the mail for a credit card from Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust bank and I started taking cash advances to pay my bills, which led to several more offers from different banks. I couldn’t keep up with the monthly payments, which weren’t reducing the balance anyway, so I just stopped. It was months before I took a full-time position at Mayer, Brown & Platt and had a steady paycheck again (though much lower than I’d been making as a temp). By then I was too deep in the hole to ever get caught up. Credit agencies hounded me daily, and about a year later I filed my own bankruptcy. I prepared it myself (on my downtime on the graveyard shift at Mayer, Brown, with the help of a Nolo Press workbook. The bankruptcy trustee on duty the day I went to court to file told me it was the best written bankruptcy he’d ever seen.

When the topic comes up of how radically different things are now from when we were kids, I always remember that one of the debts I had cleared in my bankruptcy was a bill from Beth Israel from when I had pneumonia in 1982 and went to the emergency room because I was short of breath. The bill was for $179, and at the time that was an amount of money I couldn’t come up with.