I took an in-house employment job as a third-year lawyer decades ago. It was a tumultuous time to be counsel at an AT&T company. After a very long and stable history, Ma Bell had divested herself of local service providers through an agreed-upon consent decree. Organizational and other chaos ensued.
My first day was not what I had expected. The office furniture had not arrived, and I sat on the floor (ironically, on a thick phone book) to take calls. (For youthful readers, a phone book is a thick directory listing the names and phone numbers of people in a city or town.) The first call was from a regional manager whose employees had gotten into a bar fight and had been arrested; the manager wanted to know what to do about the jailed employees. The second came from a hysterical-sounding sales support manager. Her boss had rented a tiger to make a grand entrance for a sales kickoff. The hotel was refusing the tiger entrance, and the employees had gathered for the meeting. What should she do?
