Learning The Law

Betsy Robinson on Harassment, the Corporate Morgue, and Learning to Fly

Dear Republic,

I’m doing contest posts slightly out of order. It turns out — who would have expected it? — that a lot more people have strong opinions about jobs they’ve had than they do about assigning labels to different literary eras. I really have an embarrassment of riches for the “Learnings” series and will post several of them this week. You can still get submissions for the series in at republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com by May 25 and I’ll run another batch next week.

It also turns out — and I guess I should have also seen this coming — that a lot of the “learnings” from work experiences have to do with harassment. Betsy Robinson writes honestly and beautifully about everything she lost as a result of one such experience — and also about how she moved forward.

I’m also, in honor of recent literary news, announcing a snap-contest! This one is sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times and is to write your list of “Top Books of the Summer.” Needless to say — and in keeping with the Sun-Times’ journalistic standards — these books may be entirely fictitious, may be books you wish existed but don’t, may be the bullseye of industry cliché, may be your critical evaluation of what publishers are actually putting out, etc. You can knock ourselves out with whatever you wish to write. Creativity welcomed. The deadline is June 1. Contest winners receive $50. All submissions to be sent to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Summer” in the subject line.

-ROL

LEARNING THE LAW

“I promise to make a concerted effort to treat Attorney X with professional courtesy and respect. I will best be able to do this if he will treat me with professional courtesy also. Therefore, I ask that:

• He address me by my name, rather than shout into the cosmos whenever he requires something;

• He use the words “please” and “thank you” when it is appropriate;

• He refrain from dressing or undressing in front of me.

I am aware that I have been cold and hostile. I recognize the unacceptability of this, and sincerely intend to change.”

This is what I wrote to the managing partner of the law firm where I worked for ten years, after being told during my review that I must learn to get along with Attorney X, or at least be polite, or, much as they enjoyed my eccentricities, I’d get the axe.

It was July 1995; Anita Hill had testified about sexual harassment four years earlier, and my office was full of lawyers. I was their night secretary. For my first six years I worked solo — the perfect marriage of eccentricity and need: I liked working alone at night, and they appreciated my speed and efficiency. I needed the stability of a cushy four-night-a-week gig with full benefits that would not intrude into my “real” life; they needed somebody who would work with no heat in winter, no AC in summer, in a room that felt like a morgue.

Then X joined the firm. He stayed almost every night, and he would have preferred it if I’d chatted. At first I tried to joke that I was paid to work, but when there were slow periods that didn’t wash. He referred to me as the Harbinger of Darkness; I called him the four-year-old from hell. “She has no respect for me,” he complained to the managing partner.

Once I tried to explain that I just wanted to do my work and go home. “What’s at home?!” he exclaimed as if I were speaking a foreign language. He had a wife and son, but he preferred to stay in the office.

As my resistance escalated, so did his demands. He became fond of telling me that, despite my designated quitting time, he could keep me there as long as he wanted; if I read a book during a slow period, he said he had the right to know what it was since it was on his time; if I ate office potato chips, he plunged his hand into the bag I was holding because he’d paid for the chips. He liked to go out for mid-evening runs. The first time he began changing into his running clothes in the hall, I was so surprised I could barely speak. It was and wasn’t sexual. He was a smart guy, he knew what he was doing, and he considered the whole office his domain.

I felt a genuine fondness for this dysfunctional family of lawyers — a warmth that had blossomed over years and was never demanded. A warmth that remained intact just as long as they left me alone. I wanted to be courteous and cooperative. I wanted to like myself again. I wanted to solidify safety by keeping my cushy job. The managing partner and the office manager promised to talk to X about my complaints. “I feel like I need a shower after he stands next to me,” I tried to explain.

“At his last job,” said the managing partner, shaking his head with exhaustion, “all the women adored him.”

The office manager was a woman and we empathized.

I hung on for several months after she quit. After all, I was now the longest employed staff member, and this was the best zombie job I’d ever find. But all that ended the evening X inserted his head under my chin to read a legal brief I was holding. Feeling his breath on my breasts, I recoiled, shoving the papers at him. “Please don’t do that!”

“If you’re so miserable working for me, why don’t you look for another job?” he snapped, and suddenly life changed.

I never liked being a secretary. It was just the best office job I’d ever found — so I got complacent. Lazy.

That’s a lie. I clung to a job I didn’t like because it was safe. I clung to avoid change, the unknown. I clung to the illusion that I had control over my life. And as long as I clung, I remained closed to the gifts of the cosmos.

“Just quit!” yelled my inner rebel.

“And then what?” responded practical me. I’d accepted this job because, over a decade ago, an employment counselor had looked at my résumé and laughed. “You’ve done too many things,” he’d said. “You have no job history.”

“I’m an actor,” I’d answered and he laughed again.

I was no longer acting. This was real life. Did I want to die, hiding in a high-rise corporate morgue? Was this all I was good for? What if this misery was an eleventh-hour wake-up alarm?

I began answering want ads. Nobody responded — not even the nonprofit where I offered volunteer legal secretary services. “We have no need for that,” they told me. “But thanks.” I gave notice by calling it “going on an indefinite leave,” fooling no one, but giving myself the illusion that once I jumped off this cliff, I could stop mid-air and rewind. The week before my last day, I got a call for a transcription job — a freelance gig which required that I spend $800 for a special slow-speed tape player. I took it as a sign.

For three terrifying years I free-fell after I quit. I transcribed till my tendons screamed, I walked dogs, I worked for ten dollars an hour as a “girl Friday,” I took pottery classes, and enrolled in a healing school which eventually led to a new life doing work I loved — and gave me a firm grasp of the law: if you cling to anything out of fear, the universe will send a disruptor with strength equal to or greater than the grip of your cold, clenched fingers.

I learned this lesson so well that a year before the Recession ended the last job I had —a job I had loved . . . until I didn't when I felt my body go into an "I've had enough; I need to work alone" contraction — I knew my time there was limited. That did nothing to mitigate my shock when, a week before Christmas 2008, I got the axe, learning that all chances of being rehired had been sabotaged by my colleague, who negotiated all the remaining salary for himself. I was hurt, furious, but at a certain level, I knew this was right. I had been done.

Of course sexual harassment and sleazy office politics are wrong. I could make a good case for outrage and victimhood. And maybe if I were younger with more energy, I'd hang out there for a while. But to do so I'd have to ignore what's always been my real work: knowing and admitting what's true at my deepest level — I needed to be kicked out of the dysfunctional morgue nest. I was absolutely done working for and with dysfunctional corporations where my creative flow succumbed to the need for constant permission, agreement, and other people's procrastination. I'd served my time and was ready to work at my own speed. I was ready to be free — a freelancer who would segue into Social Security plus whatever gig work I could pick up.

The great poet and sage Rumi wrote:

“Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall and falling,
they're given wings.”

I'm seventy years old and I'm flying.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, LitHub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.