When at work you need to follow the instructions of your boss and try to make their life easier whenever possible.

What would you do if you tried to point out an error that your boss made, but before you could even alert her, she shushed you in front of a room full of people?

That is what happened to the intern in this story, so she just sat back and stayed silent until the judge asked her about it and realized the error she made.

Check it out.

Boss shushes me when I try to warn her of a mistake.

So, I am a Lawyer in Brasil, but when I was at college I got an internship at a Tribunal.

I usually worked behind the scenes, dealing with paperwork and some bureaucratic stuff.

It was usually a nice place to work, but occasionally the Judge (the boss of my boss) would require some intern to help her with the hearings.

Wow, that is a lot of lawsuits.

It was not unpleasant work, but more of an annoyance since we were only 8 people dealing with the paperwork of over 10k lawsuits.

Which means that every time she requested someone to go help her, they knew that there would be a lot of accumulated work when they got back.

Something I need to point about this specific judge is that she was a very polite and pleasant person outside of work.

But at the court, she would become extremely micromanaging, especially about bureaucratic stuff that she never had to deal with and didn’t understand, usually making our work take way longer than it needed to be, and whenever a lawyer was present suddenly she became very rude and demanding to anyone below her.

I understand that most lawyers that worked there were extremely sexist and that was just probably her response to that, a way to say “don’t you try me, I know what I am doing and I am good at it.”

But I can not agree with her taking that frustration on everyone else.

On this specific day, I had been assigned to help her with a very long hearing.

In Brasil this stuff is all recorded, so for me, that meant taking care of the computer, taking notes but mostly making sure that the camera was on.

Sounds simple enough.

The thing is, whenever you do these recordings it has a kind of script that needed to be followed.

First she would tell me to start recording, then she would present herself, tells what case was being judged, then name the first witness and show their documents to the camera (to prove that we were questioning the right person).

Only after that, she would start questioning the witness, then the lawyers take turns doing the same.

I am not sure why, but she was more annoyed with me than usual that day, and did everything in her power to show everyone in the room that SHE WAS THE BOSS and I was supposed to just do what she said without arguing.

But despite that, she was talking a lot with the lawyers about trivial stuff while waiting for some witnesses that hadn’t arrived yet.

Finally, everyone is there and the hearing can begin, but for some reason, she was so distracted with the conversation, that she forgot about the script and just started questioning the witness without doing the proper presentations and asking me to start recording.

As soon as she started questioning him I tried to discretely warn her, but all I could say was “Your honor…” before she loudly shushed me without looking in my direction.

Rude and unprofessional.

It was not at all discreet and everyone was visibly embarrassed (including me), so I did the only thing I could in that situation.

Nothing.

I couldn’t start recording without the presentations and definitely not do it in the middle of the hearing.

So I just sat there and waited.

After almost half an hour of questioning, she asked me to stop the recording because they would do a small recess.

All I could say was: “As I tried to warn you, Your Honor, the video was not recording when you started questioning him”.

She got visibly white and started saying “But you should have…” before realizing her mistake.

That must have been awkward.

She tried looking around for support but everyone saw the way she shushed me and had that look of “Well, he’s got a point”.

I don’t know exactly what happened after that because they did the recess anyway and I was sent back to my usual work and didn’t get to participate in the rest of the hearing (it was a relief because I had a lot of work to do).

I graduated a couple of days later and I don’t think there were any big repercussions about this specific mistake, but I heard a few years later that, since her productivity was extremely low (and after other, more serious mistakes), she got demoted.

She is an “auxiliary-judge” today, which means that she helps other judges but is not responsible for dealing with any lawsuits on her own.

Did she really think that she was interrupting for no reason?

Foolish judge.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say bout this story.

Oh, I’m sure this is true.

People who can’t admit mistakes are the worst.

I’m sure it is the same in Brazil.

This might be a good explanation.

That would be amazing.

This judge was guilty of being rude.

Among other things.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.