At T-minus seven minutes to the meeting, I rushed my laptop up a flight of stairs to the desk of a secretary and huffed out a desperate plea: Please print this for me, seven copies. She looked up at what surely was a normal speed, but which I perceived as the pace of a snail emerging from a shell, and said,

“Just give me a second, dear.” She smiled.... See more

More than anything else it was this feeling that captivated me—the feeling that, literally, made me captive.

I was just there at The Firm as a stopover, to get the skills, I would have said at the time; this was not really me, I would have said, but it was a thin defense. How quickly I was becoming an icky person in these small, important moments. This is to say nothing of the actual impact of the work I was doing, which, I believe, was marginally useful... See more