-City Attorney's Office-Book One -Professional Camouflage-Chapter One

He fell assbackwards into that job. He fell assbackwards into most things. It wasn’t that he ended up there accidentally. He did everything quite intentionally. It’s just that he saw the job announcement on the last day that it was open. It was also that a new city attorney had just been elected in Seattle. Pete Holmes had been marginally to the left of the city attorney he defeated in the 2009 election, but a marginal ideology difference in Seattle politics often turned out to be an uncrossable chasm for many a politician. Welcome to Seattle; the place where political careers go to die. That change in leadership had opened up an opportunity. That is, the city attorney’s office had suffered a mass exodus in December 2009 and January 2010. 

     Many who had feared new leadership left of their own accord. Others had been casualties of the ritual ideological herd culling by the new administration. Either way, there had been an opportunity for a new law school graduate like Ben to slide into a job as a prosecutor at the city attorney’s office. I was punching way above my weight class landing that job, but I showed up and hoped that nobody would figure out that I didn’t belong. I started putting on that professional camouflage way back in middle school. I always got thrown into the advance classes, but unfortunately that meant that I went from being the smartest person in a class full of dumb dumbs, to the dumbest person in a class full of smart-ass overachievers. 

     Ben had been getting by in this manner most of his life, and one day at the city attorney’s office convinced him that he’d be able to continue his well-worn pattern of succeeding by hiding in plain sight. This was mostly accomplished by not talking too much. Ben was smart, but was usually surrounded by more intelligent people. What he noticed long ago was that people, smart and dumb alike, tend to start talking too much when they became flustered. Women did it, men did it, kids definitely did it. You can catch a kid red handed, covered in red paint, standing next to the dog he just pained red, and he’ll tell you that Sally did it. In fact, he won’t stop at telling you Sally did it. He’ll come up with a whole narrative about how he was in the house watching TV when he heard the dog growling, and, how he came out to investigate. If you confront him about being covered in paint, he’ll give you some other, nervously constructed, long-winded explanation that exculpates him from the crime. Anyway, staying quiet and looking engaged made one appear wise. When speaking became unavoidable, repackaging what was just said by another tended to work pretty well. But that’s the survey course, I got a whole fuckin’ graduate-level class on surviving a professional jungle with limited talent.   

     You couldn’t even say that most of what was said that first week at the city attorney’s office went in one ear and out the other because that would have required that Ben actually registered what had been said on some level. No, most of it went right over his head. The general criminal law course is the first class that every law school student takes. For the majority of law school students, it’s also the last criminal law course they ever take. Most law students take their required first-year classes and then spend years two and three focusing on the practice areas they are actually interested in. For most, that’s civil law courses. 

     Ben was no different. He passed his first-year criminal law course and didn’t give the subject another thought until he was studying for the bar. Passing the bar required revisiting long-forgotten subjects like criminal law. That was it, no other criminal-focused coursework or internships, nothing. Most of the people at the city attorney’s office had spent the entirety of their time in law school learning criminal law, doing summer internships at prosecutor’s offices, and generally preparing for careers as prosecutors. Ben passed the bar, sent out a few resumes to downtown law firms, and gave up on finding work as an attorney altogether. 

     Two years after getting a license to practice law, Ben was working as a night-shift stocker at the QFC inside the Broadway Market. One day, he saw a job announcement pop up on his Linkedin page for Assistant City Prosecutor. Ben was actually sitting there that day wondering why he even had a LinkedIn page when he saw the announcement. The more on-point observation would have been, why did he bother checking it every day, because he never applied for any of the jobs he saw. 

     On both of the job interviews he had at downtown law firms, back when he was still sending out resumes, he blew it. They were entry-level jobs, and they were looking for fresh law school grads who had done coursework and internships in employment and labor law. He was specifically qualified for both positions, but something about being qualified for a position seized up his personality. He was wooden. He couldn’t convey information in an interesting fashion. He was like the kid at the school assembly, trembling hands, clutching his prepared speech, reading it verbatim without even looking up once to acknowledge the bleachers full of students. 

     Applying for the Assistant City Prosecutor job was a goof. 

     He didn’t take it seriously. He knew he wasn’t qualified. He knew people from law school that did the internships at prosecutors’ offices that graduated Magna Cum Laude that didn’t get that job at the city attorney’s office in 2008 when they graduated. He didn’t expect an interview at all. He didn’t realize that that office was in flux, and desperate for warm bodies, would hire anyone with a license to practice law that would take the job. He did get an interview, and since he had no expectation about actually getting the job, he crushed it.

     That’s not to say that Ben didn’t show up as well as he could. On the day of the interview, he ironed the better of his two suits, the navy one. The gray one had peaked lapels, and the fabric was flat, not textured like the navy blue one. In fact, at that time Ben had two of almost everything, two suits, two white shirts, two ties. There was two of everything needed to get a job as a lawyer, everything except shoes. Ben had one pair of dress shoes. They were pretty nice, a mid-to-high end brand sold at Nordstrom. He couldn’t remember the brand, and the gold-embossed company markings on the inside heel leather of the shoes had long since worn off, but they were more than good enough for his purposes.

     It was a panel interview, not his first. The two interviews he’d had back in 2008 were panel interviews as well. Those both had three people panels. Both interviews’ panels had a very similar composition, a managing partner who sat silently uninterested in the entire affair, a token minority or woman to explain the firm’s, air quotes, “commitment to diversity”, and a whip cracker i.e., a mean middle-aged white guy that was the junior partner in charge of humiliating and torturing new associates.

     The city attorney’s panel was different. There were five, the Trial Unit’s supervisor, a Domestic Violence Victim’s Advocate, the new Criminal Division Chief, the new elected City Attorney, the Office Manager, and the new City Attorney’s Chief of Staff. It was a hot panel too. They kept throwing questions at Ben, sometimes lumping questions on before he’d had an opportunity to answer the one asked just prior. At that interview, he appeared unflappable. Even when he didn’t have a great answer, he brushed it off and kept rolling. Two weeks later, he got a call from the Trial Unit Supervisor, a few days after that an offer letter arrived in his mailbox.