“I’ve Been Listening To Your Reasonin’; It Makes No Sense At All…”

I’m a paralegal at a law office. We have to send a bunch of letters out for a case we are working on. All the information is put together on Excel sheets, and we just have to copy that information and format it into each letter.

One day, a letter gets sent back as it had the wrong address. Since another lawyer working there on a trial basis did all these letters with me, our boss comes and lets us know.

Boss: “Hey, this letter had the wrong address, so if we could just send a new one out, that would be great. I’m not mad; accidents happen. That spreadsheet was long and it was probably easy to mix things up.”

IMMEDIATELY, [Lawyer] starts throwing me under the bus.

Lawyer: “Well, I know I did everything right, so it wasn’t me. It was probably [My Name] or [Other New Lawyer], but I double-checked everything, so it couldn’t have been me.”

Me: “[Other New Lawyer] only worked on one letter since he couldn’t access the computers that day. Relax. It’s a little mistake — no big deal.”

Lawyer: “Yeah, but it wasn’t me. You remember that Shaggy song from the 2000s? That’s me right now because it wasn’t me.”

I bit my tongue. I saw that I was the one who did that letter, but it wasn’t my fault, either, as the actual address was incorrect on the sheet.

What’s worse is that while reviewing [Lawyer]’s letters before we sent them out, he completely f***ed up some of the addresses, and I fixed them. It pissed me off so much how willing and ready he was to blame me for a problem when it more than likely would have been his fault.