What’s the Most Bizarre Memo You’ve Ever Received?

Joy
Jun 19, 2009 7:35 AM CST

I love that note. It goes right along with my first law of city management - time is spent on issues in inverse proportion to their importance.

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SHN
Jun 19, 2009 7:56 AM CST

At my former firm, every floor had a small kitchen and one or more conference rooms.  Anytime someone served lunch in a conference room or burnt popcorn in the kitchen, the smell infiltrated the entire floor.  This “problem” prompted the managing partner to send a memo banning “smelly food” in the office.  There was a noticeable decrease in the consumption of microwave popcorn and barbeque for quite some time after that.

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Capri
Jun 19, 2009 8:21 AM CST

A boss of mine once expressed how frustrated he was that we thought all his ideas were non-starters, and called us all negative. He yelled, “You’d all look at the Titanic and say, that’s too big, we can’t build that!”

I suppressed my desire to point out that the Titanic sank and was a terrible tragedy.

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terram
Jun 19, 2009 8:52 AM CST

When I was an associate at a firm, we had a managing partner whose internal memos were infamous.  My favorite memo was one in which he railed on an anonymous attorney for ordering up a file from the dead storage file and then not picking it up, expressing outrage at the cost to the company of ordering up such files if not needed (I believe the cost was $11 per file at the time).  If one figured out the cost of (a) his time to dictate the memo; (b) his assistant’s time to type it and distribute in mail boxes (this was the days before emails), and (c) the time we all spent reading the memo and laughing about it with colleagues, we wasted substantially more than $11!

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B. McLeod
Jun 19, 2009 10:22 AM CST

Many years ago, I spent a few years as an “associate” in a firm.  We had many of the same partner types described above, including the thermostat freak and the microwave popcorn hater.  We had bureacratic procedures out the kazoo, and non-lawyer administrators who monitored “associates’” use of office supplies to police against waste of tape flags, binder clips, etc.  They also opened and read all “associate” mail, to make sure all incoming communications were related to properly authorized firm business.  I will check my collection later for memos, to see if I saved any that might actually be accepted by a sane reader as authentic.

However, the very best firm writing from those days was not a simple memo, but a partner I.O.U.  One of the name partners was addicted to candy of all types.  He would make the rounds of his entire floor, visiting every office and cubicle where there was any type of candy bowl or dispenser.  As an aside, I myself had an M&M dispenser in those days, and this partner would come to my office and work the mechanism until he had eaten all the M&Ms;in the dispenser.  But he had marked crepitus in one knee, so staff could, at least, hear him coming.  Ultimately, I solved my problem by getting a much smaller, pocket-size dispenser, so that when he arrived in my office, only that was sitting out where he could empty it.

Not everyone fared as well.  One of the administrative accountants had a candy bowl on her desk.  The convention was for staff who partook to bring replacement candy and/or money to contribute to refills.  But not the candy-sucking name partner.  He would do with the bowl as was his custom, leaving it to be refilled by others.  Finally one day, the accountant (who was also a bit unstable) actually took him to task for it, leaving other staffers scrambling for their offices while they could maintain composure.  Perhaps still in a state of shock, the name partner hand-wrote a five-dollar I.O.U., and put it in the candy bowl.

When I left the firm over a year later, the I.O.U. was still in the candy bowl, unredeemed.  More years went by, and one day I saw in a business publication that the accountant had also left the firm for another job.  I will admit, I was curious to the extent that I called her up to congratulate her on the job change (and of course to inquire about the fate of the five-dollar I.O.U.).  She laughed, and told me that it had, in fact, never been paid.

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NG
Jun 19, 2009 10:42 AM CST

About 12 years ago, while an associate at a white-shoe New York firm, I received a memo about the firm’s then-new summer casual Friday policy.  The highlights I remember best are that shorts were allowed if they extended below the knee, and sandals were allowed - so long as socks were worn with them.  Now that’s a good look.

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Rob
Jun 19, 2009 11:15 AM CST

After drafting a brief in support of a motion for summary judgment for a senior partner, the senior partner returned the brief under memo which simply stated “Do this one over.  I can’t polish horse_ _ _ _!”  I soon found out, and then witnessed several times over the following several years, that this senior partner wrote this memo to ALL 1st year associates.

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NM Sox Fan
Jun 19, 2009 2:09 PM CST

The senior partner sent a memo decrying finding the NYT “unceremoniously draped on the Men’s Room floor” that morning.  He reminded us the NYT was for our clients and should be returned “in pristine condition” to the waiting room.  Another time, he informed all of us that he “would not be sending Xmas cards” that year and that we should just exchange Merry Xmas’s at the office and be done with it.  Finally, after a trip to India, he told all of us he would be available in the conference room from 2 to 4 p.m. to talk about his trip.  So many people had dropped by his office to ask about his trip that he could not get his work done.

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Susan Macaulay
Jun 19, 2009 5:44 PM CST

I received my two most bizarre memos when I was in-house counsel at a publicly-traded company with management that should have known better.  The first came from the CEO, who sent a memo to all 1500 employees extolling the virtues of casting one’s vote in the upcoming naional election, but emphasizing that employees should be sure to do so on their own time, NOT during work hours.  We got him to send out a “clarification” acknowledging the employees’ legal right to take two hours off to vote, but he wasn’t happy about it.

The other came from the attorney who was the head of my practice group at the same company asking me to provide him a list of everyone in the business group for which I worked who was Jewish.  (I knew that the reason he wanted it was because he wanted to solicit everyone who I identified as Jewish for a contribution to a charity for which he was the local chair.)  I sent him back a memo saying that I had no idea who was Jewish and who wasn’t and that I had no intention of finding out. 

He was a jerk on so many levels that it didn’t surprise me that he had his secretarywalk over to my office to pick up a list of everyone in the business group as soon as he got my reply, and then told her to figure out who was Jewish and who wasn’t, apparently based on last names.  I really hated that guy. .

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Anonymous
Jun 20, 2009 3:31 PM CST

I worked as a paralegal before going to law school, so these anecdotes come from the mid-1990’s when I worked for a mid-sized firm in the South.  The non-attorney staff manager was a bit of a tyrant.  I don’t remember exactly how they were worded, but there’s the gist of the two most notorious things I remember:

1)  The staff being reminded that we need to keep up a professional appearance; knee-length skirts and pantyhose are preferred for the ladies.  With the exception of secretary Patricia who has a note from her doctor because of a medical condition, authorizing her to dress like that.  The rest of us were by no means to get the idea that we could wear a “glorified tracksuit” like Patricia did.

2)  A certain popular mid-priced restaurant close to our office was for attorneys only.  The attorneys didn’t want to be seated next to staff when they went out to eat, so we were requested to stay away.

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W.E.S.
Jun 23, 2009 6:10 PM CST

At my old firm, a memo was circulated about the computers. It started with “Should your terminal start to spark and/or catch fire, do not call tech support. Step away from the computer and call the fire department.”

It just went downhill from there, but basically said that if there were any flickers, sparks, or funny noises from the computers, do not call tech support.

We had computers at that firm that were c. 1984 (and this in 2005). They were prone to fires and shorting out.

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RLK
Jun 26, 2009 7:44 AM CST

At my last firm, another associate tended to walk around the office in bare feet, which was kind of gross. This prompted my partner to send a memo to the office that everyone must wear shoes in the office.

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Turkey
Jun 26, 2009 1:49 PM CST

When someone ransacked our office refrigerator and ate a new package of turkey, I wrote a nice memo and posted on the refrigrator: “To the thief who stole my turkey, please return by the end of the week. No questions asked.  Thanks. Anon.” 

The next day, the empty turkey package was posted on the refrigerator, with the following note: “To whoever brought the turkey. It was okay. Please bring ham next time. Thief.”

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