I was assigned a temp secretary job about 5-6 weeks ago. Three temps had gone through the job and left or were let go. I came in and did a great job. I lasted over a month and, when the person I was replacing returned from maternity leave, was asked to stay on as a litigation paralegal. I have prior paralegal experience but no litigation experience.

Yesterday, they gave me two small things to do. I was slow on the first but did much better on the second. Today, they gave me nothing to do and it made me very frustrated. The first project was especially frustrating and, as I was leaving, I was discussing it with a secretary from another department. I thought it would help because part of the problem with the assignment was technical - the attorney insists on working in WordPerfect and then all of this work has to be converted to MS Word. The conversion technology is not very good and, rather than trying to fix the formatting, I had to delete a third of the document, cut a similar section from another document, paste that in and then fix the wording. It took a while to find a similar document to cut the section from.

As I am discussing this with the secretary while walking in the building lobby, who should turn the corner? The attorney who gave me the assignment. I don't know if he heard but I think he did. Part of this is really bad luck on my part. Or, maybe I should have known better to discuss / complain about it. It's not the first time that I have put my foot in my mouth like this. What do you think? In the future, I will have to be much more careful not to complain about anything anywhere near the office.

And, frankly, I am not sure this new position is for me. Its subject matter is nearly totally foreign to me and I am the 7th person to have the position in the last year. It will involve, at times, a lot of overtime (to midnight) and some travel. I may have already blown it with my big mouth. I cannot predict what will happen.