Oh Drat

Side note: This post was initially titled “Oh Shit,” but I decided that I should try to keep the swearing to the body of the posts, not the titles. I am trying to tone down my offensiveness after my baby sister sent me the following email last week after I used the word “shit” in an email to her work account:

Please do not send emails containing inappropriate language to my work account, as it may be perceived as offensive to others.

Oops. Sorry Sis! So yeah, no swearing in post titles. ANYWAY, as to why this email is entitled “oh drat:” I’m screwed. I’ve been working at this job for five weeks now. If you've been paying attention, you know that I've not exactly been loving it, especially since I seem to be the go-to girl for all the little annoying projects that attorneys were supposed to do but don’t have time for. I’m writing their memos, preparing their Continuing Legal Education programs, transcribing their handwritten notes from phone calls with foster care advocates in North Dakota. The attorneys who have assigned me work (there are two of them) have been out of town for approximately 97% of my time here, which has made it hard to get regular feedback, and has also made it nearly impossible for me to motivate myself to actually work on these tasks with any amount of efficiency. So I was planning to chalk this up to a learning experience, happy that I didn’t need or expect a job offer from this office, and that I wasn’t relying on them for a letter of reference. I was doing my work, but not doing it with any particular sense of urgency, and those written projects that I was turning in were not especially awesome. I was leaving work pretty much at 5 on the dot to go to yoga in the afternoons. I was taking leisurely lunches. Except then I realized yesterday that, oops, I AM relying on them for a letter of reference. Gah. It turns out that one of the fellowships I’m interested in applying for needs a letter of reference from a law school employer, and since I’m applying for a job at the place I worked last summer, it would be sort of weird and redundant to get a letter of reference from them. So I need a letter of reference from here. And I have four working days left in which to try to secure a great letter, after 5 weeks of friendly mediocrity. Shit. So the question is this: if you had four days to turn the ship around and start making a whiz-bang impression on your boss in an effort to convince him that he is SO GLAD he hired you, even though you only worked for him for 6 weeks, how would you do it?