Years ago when I was working on the asbestos litigation for Johns Manville I was in charge of gathering the resumes and setting up interviews for temporary attorneys. Everyone thinks getting a law degree is automatic assurance of a good job, but lawyers are a dime a dozen, especially the ones with no experience and no network connections. So the people who applied for these jobs were fairly recent graduates without jobs and older losers who’d failed at working in law firms and failed at being sole practitioners. Some of them had no work ethic so no matter how much education they got they would never make it in the long run.

Some sent in resumes, and some called and left a message on my answering machine. I was a temporary employee myself and it was a big deal that I got to have a phone and answering machine of my own. When applying for a job I am the sort who is shy about calling a phone number, I’d rather send in my resume, but from the other side of it, I found myself responding to the recorded messages, calling the people back to let them know what to do next, more than I did the mailed in resumes because the phone calls seemed more urgent. That was a lesson that a person should do both - send a resume and follow with a phone call, even if it was to leave a message.

Some of the resumes were pathetic, and you had to wonder how these illiterate non-verbal people made it through law school. But of course not all law schools have high standards. There were a couple of resumes, one who’d worked in construction until he decided to be a lawyer, that were so bad – one was actually mimeographed or something, and this was in 1985 – that my friends and I were tempted to type one up for him to make copies of and use.

I was also the contact person for the Asbestos Litigation Document Repository. Remember that warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Rows and rows of stacked boxes? That’s what our warehouse looked like, I don’t think I ever actually went there, just saw pictures. I leased the space, found janitors, and staffed it with paralegals all from headquarters. Looking back, that seems odd, but I was just doing the work and then higher ups went there to see it and look important. Fine by me.

Anyhow, every document related to asbestos that Johns Manville had, including employee files from the manufacturing plants all over the country, and internal insurance company documents produced in the litigation, were stored there and available to anyone who wanted to review them in aid of getting compensated for personal injury due to asbestos.

In order to control access and know who was coming in, they had to go through me to get an authorization card. I truly envisioned families using their summer vacation to come to Denver to look for evidence to help with getting compensation, and of course some lawyers. But hardly anybody called because 99% of the cases were being handled by lawyers with hundreds or thousands of asbestos claimants and these lawyers had all the ammunition they needed.

One day there was a strange voice message left on my answering machine, and it took me awhile to figure it out. At first I thought it was my work friends calling to make fun of me. It was two women who had made a conference call to my phone number. “She sounds soooo tired. I’ll bet she’s really organized. She probably has all her documents indexed.” Comments like that. I finally figured out that these were paralegals who worked for one of the big class action lawsuit asbestos attorneys calling after the number was published in the trade newsletters.

Eventually, the Asbestos Personal Injury Trust was started, and all those documents were shipped there; JM had nothing to do with the claims and the litigation, the claimants applied to the trust for compensation. I became a permanent employee of JM in a different department and kept that same phone number. Six years after all this had died down, I got a phone call at work from what sounded like a young lawyer. Somewhere he’d gotten the number for Manville Asbestos Document Repository and called it. It just struck me as hilarious that he was so out of the loop, yet maybe thinking he was going to make some money out of the asbestos litigation, and he became even more flustered when I just laughed out loud at him. Couldn’t help myself.

Can you see the fish? It's huge. I was standing 30 feet above it on the edge of the driveway, and estimate it to be about 20 inches long. People have told me we have large fish on the property here, but this is the first time I've seen any this size.