morose
i want to go home.
a summer associate called my dept, asking for a list of the matters he worked on while he was here. i couldn't figure out his name in the voicemail, so i did some minor snooping and figured it out without too much trouble. so far so good. (this has happened to me before -- the oddest case was when someone left a voicemail with a strange asian name there was no way i could guesstimate. i ended up googling the phone number he left, which turned out to be another law firm. i located their site, checked their directory for vaguely familiar names... and there he was!) anyway, just about all the work he did was internal, so my report shows nothing. he called again and i had to stall him while i gathered info from various sources (so i could at least give him something) and am now waiting for a higher-up to determine what to tell him. i have never come across this situation before and i feel bad because the former summer wants an answer now so he can submit his info to another firm. sure, it's not my fault, but still...
someone from hr contacted someone in my dept to see if we could track down a name. apparently someone by that name had told a friend to contact his attorney here in case of an emergency, but the friend didn't have any additional info other than a last name which didn't fit anyone who could have helped. so we had to figure out if this person was a client and if so, who worked on his matters? the emergency is that the person is in the icu in another state and is not expected to live! dear god. so i checked all avenues available to me and came up short. it depresses the hell out of me that some guy is dying in a hospital somewhere, waiting for his attorney to call him and we can't even find out who that might be. the guy in my dept who got the request said to me that "thought it might be fun to solve that one." fun? sure, i like a challenge as much as anyone else, but the man. is. dying.
i hate work today. there are too many random (unhappy) things keeping me from my regular stuff. i just want the day to be over, and these strange requests are making time move too slowly.