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CroWninG aCHieveMent: Harvey, tHe General Counsel
stantly bad-mouth Arthur and, sometimes, Stuart, spoke as if his every word might end up in front of a grand jury. Toward the end, even Nor- man managed by implication to get on the bad-mouth list.
Fred also had the obnoxious habit of physically invading zones that should not be invaded. He might, for instance, come into your office and, wishing to speak to you, proceed to walk behind your desk and stand right next to you while you were seated, perhaps crowding in to look at the document in front of you and trapping you in an uncomfortable posi- tion. I quickly got into the habit of motioning him back to the front of the desk, but he never got into the habit of starting there in the first place. Further, when he might confront you in the hall, and you were both standing, he would talk into your face with maybe twelve inches between you. If you were to back away from this uncomfortable physical confron- tation, he would merely walk toward you as you moved. Ultimately, I hit on the key solution, which became a metaphor for how to deal with Fred. Once he would get to the twelve-inch point, I would start to walk toward him—and he would immediately and unconsciously back away.
I did not like Fred. Arthur hated Fred. Stuart hated Fred. Everyone (other than Norman, it seemed) hated Fred.
There were also four very non-key people on the staff, all of whom were related to Norman: Norman’s wife, Gloria, who came in with Nor- man every day and did nothing that I was aware of, other than to occasionally complain, accurately, that her husband could not be dragged away from his desk in a nuclear attack; Norman’s sister-in-law, Gloria’s sister, who showed up occasionally and said nothing to anybody other than to Gloria; Norman’s pretentious nephew, Mitchell, who had somehow gotten an LL.B. when the faculty of his matchbook-cover law school must have been on holiday and who was therefore someone whom I was “tasked” with supervising; and Norman’s other brother, an extremely overweight, diabetic retired dentist, referred to as “Dr. Dansker,” who did some commercial leasing for the company, told Borscht Circuit jokes (pretty well, in fact), and was relegated by Nor- man to a tiny office in the bowels of Coronet, where Norman never visited. I am sure that Norman’s son, who had wisely escaped to Vermont,
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