Les noms imbecile -- Le supplice ajoute d'etre secretaire

(translation: Stupid Names -- The further Torture of Being a Secretary)

As the general populace may or may not know, during my stint in LA this summer, I am working 3/4 days a week at a law firm I will refer to as Lawyers R Us. It is tedious and uninteresting work that I do, but Lawyers R Us is paying me, so who am I to complain?

One of my tasks is 'indexing' which basically entails arranging various papers in chronological order, fastening them into binders and/or folders and typing up long table-of-contents pages. As such, I am often typing the same words over and over and over again. A brief sample of these words would be something including: plaintiff, defendant, subpoena, admissions, declarations, reply etc. Company names are also something that frequently is included in the title of documents, so as you would expect I am often typing Fish Products Processing Company or Disgruntled Former Employee or Money-Hoarding Step-Daughter repeatedly. Typically, this affords me no more irritation than one would expect from typing anything fifteen hundred times. However, recently this has changed.

Enter company with really stupid name.

Little did I know what teeth-grinding frustration I was letting myself in for when I sidled merrily up to Secretary Candice and pronounced myself finished with Task Past and ready for Task Future. Task Future was handed to me in the disguise of a typical stack of jumbled and disorganized papers that I have become so familiar with. But upon extracting the first document and perusing its title, I realized this task would be different from any task I had yet completed.

The company in question had ill-advisedly opted to name itself something akin to Angry Gorilla.

Yes, Angry Gorilla.

There I was, now forced into several hours of typing Angry Gorilla, Angry Gorilla, Angry Gorilla, Angry Gorilla, Prestigious Company's Objection to Special Interrogatories Set One (1) Propounded by Defendant Angry Gorilla. Plaintiff Tarzan and Dumbo Inc.'s Reply to Defendant Angry Gorilla's Proposed Notice of Eviction. Oops! Delete, Delete, Delete.

Had I been transcribing some brilliant scientist's notes on his ground-breaking animal behavior study or penning Lion King 5, I would have been more than content to punch out 'Angry Gorilla' incessantly on the keyboard and hear the word ringing in my head, accompanied by the parade of all the various things one's mind associates with the enraged jungle mammal. But in the context of a legal document? What utter rot! The imbecilic adjective-noun pairing turned torture device morphed every impressive and formal line of clean and beautifully precise jargon into some sort of drunken, tasteless joke, that only it found amusing at the expense of rest of the universe's inner peace and sense of balance. I silently sent wrathful psychic energy out to wreck havoc on the boorish, pea brain fraternity brothers who I expect thought it was such a hilariously drole idea to name their company such unprofessional drivel.

I hope the opposing counsel discovers every opportunity to mock them on this point. Then they might begin to know the a small fraction of the pain it is to be a secretary.