Evolution of One Demanding B Part Four: The world’s worst employee

Part One is here

Part Two is here

Part Three is here

An Excellent Worker; A Lousy Employee

I like solving problems, thinking around corners.  I get my teeth into a problem and do not let go until I find a solution.  This makes me an excellent paralegal.

This also makes me a lousy employee.  I’m not content to be a cog in the system, churning out the same material that worked last time this time and every time thereafter.  My experience has been that bosses say that they want creative solutions and employees who will be resourceful and find cheaper, better, faster ways to accomplish the work — up until they are actually faced with someone doing just that.  “I’ve never seen it done that way.  I’m not sure that will work.  Let’s just do it the tried and true way.”

He Almost Didn’t Hire Me

I was really lucky when I ran into attorney Michael Troncellito.  He gave me my first real break into this paralegal gig.  Remember the elevator story?  The boss in that story was Michael.  He has been absolutely formative in my story from employee to boss, always pushing me just a little further.

He almost didn’t hire me.  He’s a Jersey boy, who had just moved to Arizona a year or so before we met.  We’ve worked together as employee and as contractor for over a decade, and he related to me that when we first met, he thought “An English major from New Mexico?  What am I going to do with HER?”

But then we took on a case where a gentleman injured his eye when the ironing board he was balancing with collapsed under him and he fell to the floor.  He ruptured his eyeball in the back, next to his nose, near the retina.  I wrote the demand package, and Michael made the mistake of reading it just before lunch.  Best compliment ever, that he skipped lunch that day due to the impact of my prose.

Six Years Later

Troncellito decided to sell that practice and take a sabbatical.  He posted my resume (as well as the rest of the staff’s curriculum vitae) to the Arizona Association for Justice website.  I then had the pleasure of considering five offers in just three days.  Michael commented that if he’d known I was that good, he’d have hired me. Oh, wait — he had.

Three years later, that resume came back as a surprise when another Arizona personal injury attorney reached out to me to ask if I’d take on contract work.