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EK: Could you talk a little bit more about your colleagues, the other people in the office?

LJ: I will say, I tell people often, this was the best job I've ever had. It was a great atmosphere. We were, for the most part, most of the people that worked in the office were, we were in our twenties and early thirties, and we were committed to the program and committed to the cause and worked a lot of really long hours, and it never felt like a burden. It was very much a family atmosphere, and we had leadership who were committed and stayed the long hours. And so I was in my early twenties, my mid-twenties, and it was great, I didn't mind. We worked hard, we played hard after work, it was very much a family atmosphere, which made it very easy to do the job. It made it very easy. My experience was a little bit different because I was there for so long and I started out as an intern and then my career kind of developed while I was in the program. But for many of the people that worked on the program, they had one specific focus, they worked on payments or they worked on initial eligibility. People had specific jobs and a case file would get passed through, and you never worried about what came next, because we were all close, and you knew that everybody had a good handle on whatever their piece of the puzzle was. And it all kind of worked together and it was, people came and went during the years and sometimes we had a huge group of contractors working on the program with us. And then that number fluctuated as the program went on, but it was just a great mix of people who were all very committed to being there. I'll never forget, we were at an office holiday party, and our holiday party tradition was we always did potluck and people brought stuff in. And one of our... I don't remember what it was because I can't remember... I don't want to attribute it to the wrong person, but somebody in the Division came to the party and said, "You guys are like the United Nations of the Civil Rights Division," and we were. I mean, there were people from all over working on the program. We had people from Africa, we had people from Asia, we had people from all over the country. And people came in with very different backgrounds and experiences and brought their own backgrounds to the program and how that made them feel and it was very, it was just fun. It was fun, and you felt like you were doing really important work. Like I said, you were able to see a finish, it was very gratifying to be able to say that somebody was eligible, or call somebody and let them know that you had everything you needed and you were going to be able to issue a payment to them and an apology. So it was great, it was a great group, and made the job more fun, for sure.

EK: How big was the operation in those early years?

LJ: I would say, in the beginning, we probably, in those earliest years, we kept moving offices to accommodate the space. So when I started, we were in a relatively small office with maybe fifteen people. And then by the time I was out of college and we were kind of in the big throes of payments, we probably had a hundred people working on the program. We probably had seventy... I want to say at one point we probably had maybe sixty or seventy contractors just working to get through the large quantity of cases, and then it scaled way back from there.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.