InfoDiva Reflections: When I Was Employed

I once did some research for this guy, at this company I can't name. He used to work at, well, this place, at our nation's capital, and the place was white, and someone also lived there so you could call it a house. And his boss, you see, who said more than once that he didn't read magazines or newspapers (but for his job, he really SHOULD have), needed some information that this guy was to supply. And so the guy gave his boss information, but he gave him the Cliff's Notes version.

Which was a legally shady thing to do. So the guy quit, to cover his own and his boss's ass. Which is why he came to work at the (unnamed) company where I worked.

He came to me with an unpublished government document. NOT top secret, just not yet published (I don't even remember what it was about), and he needed a copy of all the other government documents plus a couple of magazine articles referenced in the unpublished one. See, this guy was now keeping his nose clean and disclosing every stinkin' tiny bit of information to his new boss so he, himself, could not be held as legally culpable.

Plus, I'm pretty sure his new boss DID read magazines and newspapers.

Anyway, he needed the documents by the next day. Fourteen documents.

So I found them. Half of them could be found on the InterWeb for free, if one only knew where to look. The other half were available through an online subscription database.

Government documents are unbelievably easy to find--legally!--if you know where to look.

I found all but one. That last one, she was a bitch. I told the guy I hadn't found it yet, and I had to leave for the day. He said he knew someone who would have it, and we should call his old workplace. I had to tell my co-worker to call the place.

She freaked out a little. I mean, this was a place that anyone can find out the phone number, but it's not a good idea to call it. And if you do, you don't expect to actually get past the switchboard. But she did it, she named our company, she dropped the guy's name, and asked for the friend he had named. She eventually actually got through to someone who worked with the friend of the guy, and asked for the document. This part took her maybe an hour.

Eventually, maybe ten days later, we got the document. Nine days late.

The other 13 documents took me one afternoon, and zero phone calls.

I'm pretty sure the guy could have gotten all 14 documents himself--some online, but most of them by calling people he knew and then calling people they knew, and it all would have taken 10 days to receive everything, plus the hours of phone calls.

We did it in 5 hours with minimal cost.

I kick ass. They don't call me InfoDiva for nothin'.