For three summers during high school and college I worked in the mailroom of a Boston law firm. The name of this firm is irrelevant (cough*rhymes with Moley Moag and Melliot* cough) because these stories really could have taken place in any mailroom, at any law firm, in any city.

An abundance of whack, story-worthy shit went down every summer, especially when I was a wide-eyed newbie, just entering the world of (soon-to-be-dead) communication technology.

The mailroom was a combination of mail, faxing, and photocopying. We had a TON of machines in there and the photocopy machines were particularly sophisticated. They could take in 200 page documents and duplicate front & back of every page, then collate, then staple and stack. These machines must have been worth $50,000 apiece.

Because I was a newbie, they had me work in the fax area, where it’s hard to screw things up too badly. The employees who had been there longer got photocopy duty. There were so many great characters in that room — it felt like a sitcom with a corny name like, “Barely Getting’ By.”

The staff included these gems:

• The spicy redheaded lady with HORRIBLE teeth who’d always talk about her kids antics and whose entire life was dedicated to bad TV, it seemed
• The take-no-shit black woman with enough attitude that the attorneys and secretaries were afraid of her
• The woman from Trinidad & Tobago who would blare the atrocious music of Rastafarian rapper Beenie Man throughout her shifts;
• The sweet-natured, short guy from another Caribbean island who was a workhorse
• The super-awkward guy who was obsessed with Bare Naked Ladies (it was 1996-1999, so he was a VERY late to the party on that one) and spoke so quickly that he was literally incomprehensible
• The 2 old guys who delivered the snail mail and were a friendlier, human version of those two old, grumpy Muppets guys, Statler and Waldorf
• The 2 handsome, black dudes who ran the office that I used to flirt with, in my own, awkward, 17 year-old way, “token white chick” way

The take-no-shit black woman was my idol for all three summers. She would paint her nails on the job, then handle giant copy jobs and act like, “WHAT? You wanna fight? Miiiiind ya business!”

She talked shit about everyone and I ate it up. She probably talked smack about me behind my back, but I didn’t care. She didn’t yell at me to my face like she did so many other people, although she DID mock the fact that I was from suburbia and insinuated that I was a redneck- but I laughed at that, too. I’d be willing to bet that she called me “honkey” or “whitey” behind my back… I only wish she’d called it to my face. I would have been rolling on the floor laughing. She was so intriguing and hilarious to me.

When I first started, as part of my “orientation” (walk through the 10×10 windowless room), I was told that the copy machines were astronomically expensive and very sophisticated, so food and drink was not allowed ANYWHERE near them. This rule was generally always obeyed, except by the lady with attitude (cliché, I know).

On one of my fist few days on the job, I remember looking over at her and watching as she did a photocopy job while cradling a styrofoam take-out container of pork fried rice OVER the copy machine. I couldn’t believe it. You weren’t supposed to even drink WATER anywhere NEAR those machines, much less ingest forkfuls of oily, pork fried rice directly over the thing.

I think that she was “spoken to” about that… and SHE was the one who ended up REAMING OUT our manager that HE was somehow at fault. He just took it and we all continued to live in fear of her. And I continued to secretly worship her.

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