Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [16]
To an outsider, it might seem sensible that if a partner had a good rapport with one of the girls, then he should be able to staff her on a project—whether it be the triplication of a purchase agreement or the cataloging of a wife’s indiscretions in a divorce suit. But such an arrangement did not seem sensible to Miss Markham. From her standpoint, it was essential that each task be met with optimal skill. While all the girls were capable secretaries, there were those who excelled at shorthand and those who had an unerring eye for the misuse of the comma. There was one girl who could put a hostile client at ease with the tone of her voice and another who could make the younger partners sit up straight simply by the controlled manner in which she delivered a folded note to a senior partner midmeeting. If excellence is to be expected, Miss Markham liked to observe, you can’t ask the wrestlers to throw the javelins.
Case in point: Charlotte Sykes, the new girl who sat to my left. Nineteen years old with black hopeful eyes and alert little ears, Charlotte had made the tactical error of typing 100 words a minute her first day on the job. If you couldn’t type 75 words a minute you couldn’t work at Quiggin & Hale. But Charlotte was typing a good 15 words per minute over the mean performance of the pool. At 100 wpm, that’s 48,000 words a day, 240,000 words a week and 12 million words a year. As a new recruit, Charlotte was probably making $15 a week, or the equivalent of less than one ten-thousandth of a cent for every word she typed. That was the funny thing about typing faster than 75 words a minute at Quiggin & Hale—from there, the faster you were typing, the less per word you were being paid.
But that’s not how Charlotte saw it. Like an adventuress trying to complete the first solo flight across the Hudson River, she hoped to type as fast as was humanly possible. And as a result, whenever a case surfaced requiring a few thousand pages of duplication, you could bet that the next light that clicked on over Miss Markham’s door would be the one under the F.
Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.
But on Wednesday, the fifth of January at 4:05 P.M., as I was transcribing a deposition, the light that clicked on was mine.
Slipcovering my typewriter (as we’d been taught to do for even the briefest of interruptions), I stood, smoothed my skirt, picked up a steno pad and crossed the pool to Miss Markham’s office. It was a paneled room with the half door of a cabaret coat check. She had a small but ornate desk with a tooled leather top, the sort at which Napoleon must have sat when quilling directives from the field.
When I entered, she looked up briefly from her work.
—There is a call for you, Katherine. From a paralegal at Camden & Clay.
—Thank you.
—Keep in mind that you work for Quiggin & Hale, not for Camden & Clay. Don’t let them slough their work off on you.
—Yes, Miss Markham.
—Oh, and Katherine, one more thing. I understand that there was a good deal of last-minute work on the Dixon Ticonderoga merger.
—Yes. Mr. Barnett said it was important that the transaction be completed before year-end. For tax reasons, I believe. And there were a few eleventh-hour emendations.
—Well. I don’t like my girls working so late during Christmas week. Just the same, Mr. Barnett appreciated your seeing it through. As did I.
—Thank you, Miss Markham.
She released me with a wave of the pen.
Stepping back into the secretarial pool, I went to the little telephone table at the front of the room. The phone was made available to the girls should a partner or a counterparty need to communicate a revision. The law firm of Camden & Clay was one of the largest litigators in the city. Though they weren’t directly involved in any of my matters, they tended to have a hand in everything.
I picked up the receiver.
—This is Katherine Kontent.
—Hey Sis!
I looked out over the pool where twenty-five of twenty-six typewriters were