1 Crowbar

Congratulations on your new job. Like most young associates, one of the many tasks you may be expected to perform is document review. This sounds like a nice cushy desk job, but the reality can be quite different and you should keep a crowbar with you at all times.

It turns out that the client you have been assigned to assist maintains a warehouse of documents that has no climate control in the middle of an office park about the size of New Jersey. Instead of getting the documents that might be useful in a neat little folder, book, binder, box, cart, or truck, you have been asked to go to the euphemistically labeled  "storage unit" for something called on site review. Which translates, dig through the boxes yourself because we may be your client but won't do anything that could actually be helpful.

After two or three months of staring at cartons of paper for 16 to 18 hours a day, six days a week you make the tragic mistake of falling asleep. While you are dreaming of the bed you get to visit for a few hours a night you miss the clanking sound of the door to the storage unit being closed and locked.

When you wake up and look at your watch the first thing you realize is that in two hours you need to meet your assigning partner's cousin (who happens to work for the client company) outside the door so he can unlock your own little version of purgatory. After a string of expletives runs through your head, the second thing you realize, is that you are locked in and have to have a freshly pressed suit on every day in order to maintain your firm's "professional appearance" while spending time with a client. (even the brief time it takes them to let you into a cobweb infested, dusty, leaking, old warehouse where your suit will inevitably be soiled) 

And now, more than ever, you will be happy that you have a crowbar in your brief case. Insert the crowbar behind the hinges on the door, a few quick wrenches and you're free. Go home, take a shower, put on a new suit, and go back to ask, yet again, to be allowed to continue the epic quest known as, on site review for discovery of all relevant documents pertaining to the contract between two corporations that don't exist any more but whose liabilities may or may not have been assumed by other corporations through convoluted acquisitions over the last two decades. But, don't forget your crowbar.