Recently, it seems like people keep asking me how my job is going. The question always catches me off guard, and I'm afraid my answers are always unsatisfactory. When I'm not at work I tend to forget that I have a job, but the reverse is also true; when co-workers ask me about my plans for the weekend I'm just as likely to draw a blank. Call it the male gift for compartmentalization: if I'm not there, it's probably not on my mind.
One of the reasons I have difficulty talking about my job is that there's not much to say about it, at least not in casual conversation:
-I read trust agreements.
-Then I reread them.
-Then I write about them, or explain them to someone else.
-Then I proofread, rewrite, and re-explain.
-Sometimes--oh boy--I write the trust agreements.
It's a terrible amount of fun, but I forgive you if you don't believe me. Like most of my enjoyments, the pleasure is in the details, and the details are difficult to convey in a gloss.
At my firm, both the litigators and the corporate counselors work with marquee-level names and companies. Sometimes I envy them their ability to convey succinctly the importance of what they are doing, but not enough to actually do what they are doing. In the estate-planning world, we refer to high-stakes litigation as a "hair-on-fire practice area," and we have to smile because our hair is rarely, if ever, on fire. It may be hard to convey the essence of what I do, but I like the people I work with and enjoy a tremendous amount of flexibility, and on most days that is worth a diminished aura of importance.
Sometimes, though, all the legalese and distribution clauses and estate tax provisions become dreary and repetitive. Sometimes, the skies stay gray and the view from my office shows the same half of a parking lot and I leave work acutely aware that I have not been outside for a single daylight hour. Against just such an occasion, I have hanging in my office the famous Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." It reminds me that no matter how tedious work can get, there are worse things, much much worse. In these dark days of cutbacks and layoffs, when institutions fail and the sword of privation hangs over all of us, I tend to believe that you could do a lot worse than to have a steady, uneventful job. Let the dull times roll.
5 comments:
Don't forget to stuff some crummies in your idgt. I thought you were a corp transactional attorney. Did you plan on doing EP? Not that my practice is terribly exciting, but EP seemed to suck the life out of me. I do everything I can to avoid it.
Mr. P
The original plan was corporate counseling, but then this trusts & estates job opened up and it was a much better fit. Our trust work involves a lot of drafting and petitions to chancery, so it's more choice of law and wordsmithing than it is tax. Given my writing/editing background and lukewarm feelings about tax, finding my way to this particular specialty felt like a lucky stroke.
Dull but steady is much better than.. entertaining?? - and unsteady. Unsteadiness really isn't so entertaining though (other than to perverse spectators); I just thought that would make a nicely bad correlation.
Which is to say, er, let the dull times roll is a good motto nowadays.
Hi Alex! Yeah, I think I must be starting my slow slide into middle age, because the steady, incremental approach generally strikes me as the most effective. After talking with Bryce yesterday I was starting to think that maybe I'd undersold my appreciation of my job, which has actually been a great boon. I guess my point was more that what makes for a good story doesn't always make for a good lifestyle.
Ep.
(And hi!)
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