Unpublished Newswire

My first office job was an internship at a law firm in Washington, DC. I was twenty years old and a college student, which meant that I was quite useless. I found out that it was one kind of torture to do pointless work for two or three hours a day—usually, producing research memos that no one read—and then another kind of torture to figure out how to do nothing until it was acceptable to leave the office at 5 p.m. I spent a lot of time texting two friends from high school, who were also newly stuck in office jobs of their own. I perfected my technique for napping while sitting upright....