Give Me Water or Give Me Death

My office took away the water. It's not that the water they had was so great – it was just tap water, but at least it was filtered and cold. Now there's just tap water. It's warm. I do not like it.

I tried to console myself with the knowledge that it at least contains all kinds of good stuff like fluoride, but that doesn't change the fact that it's warm, bad-tasting water.

We considered starting a petition to demand that the management return water to us, whether in filtered form or in bottles, but we became concerned that such a petition would end up on some kind of legal gossip site, leading people all around the world to denigrate our firm as the kind of place that doesn't care enough about its employees to provide water.

I mean, think about the impact on recruiting. Meanwhile, it can't be great to having interviewees come in to discover no water. I wouldn't know, actually. I don't interview people unless that means taking them to lunch, because I can think of few things more horrible than being stuck in my office for half an hour interviewing someone and then running out of questions to ask at the 10-minute mark and having nothing to say for the next 20 minutes.

Of course, having no water is worse than that would be. Much, much worse.

I know that people out in the non-big firm world don't get free beverages. I feel for you, really I do. Actually, I don't, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

The thing is, when you work for a big firm, you expect that, in exchange for your personal life and your eternal soul, you will receive tasty beverages free of charge. That's the deal, and everyone is on board with that. It's just not right to leave people with nothing but Coke or Sprite or warm tap water. I don't drink Coke and Sprite and thus am left with nothing but the tap water. Some have suggested that perhaps I should purchase my OWN water, but what part of "deal with the devil" don't you understand? GIVE ME MY FREE WATER, DAMMIT!

Mortality Makes Me Fat

I read somewhere about a study that showed that thinking about death makes people eat more. In other words, knowledge of one's own mortality = fat.

I think that goes a long way toward explaining my predicament. Every time I think about not eating that cookie, I say to myself, well, wait a minute...what if I'm hit by a bus on my way home tonight and this is the very last cookie I will ever eat?

Or maybe it's just that I'm just a pig. On that note, below please find a very old post pondering the joy of hamburgers (redacted to remove name of city I was visiting and edited for brevity). Why am I posting old stuff?

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(Originally posted 2-27-07)

Upon my arrival in [City], I embarked upon a solemn quest, with but one goal in mind: to revisit the burgerly delights of White Castle.

So I did, and it was good. Perhaps you do not fully comprehend the deliciousness of the burger, why movies are made to give praise to its genius.

What you have to understand is this...it is perfection in tiny square hamburger form. It is unlike any other hamburger you will ever find. It is a mystery; it is my muse. The tastes explode in your mouth. The texture is pure ecstasy. The immutable boundaries segregating bread and meat and cheese dissolve, forming a molten core of gooey rapture that violates all laws of man and God and burger cookery.

Plus they added a jalapeño cheese variety.

Updates and Stuff

Sorry for going MIA for so long. I maintain that going to bed at 10 is great for the mental health and all, but it doesn't do much for the whole life-outside-work arena. You will note that I am posting this after 10. So I'm very bad, but I had some outpatient surgery today and decided I deserve to stay up late.

Meanwhile, I promised some details about The Work Situation. The short story is that I started out with "I am quitting my job," which became, "I am quitting my job, but maybe I'll start my own legal practice," and then, "I am quitting my job and starting my own legal practice, and maybe my old job will give me some work on a contract basis," to "Maybe I can become an official contract attorney." I went to the firm with the contract attorney proposal, and the firm accepted.

Then I said, hm, well, maybe I should consider an associate position but with greatly reduced hours (and still no benefits). Firm accepted this proposal.

Then, when I discovered I had some delightful health issues that made it inconvenient to seek individual insurance, I finally came around and realized that the program I had originally considered (the 120 hrs/month proposal + benefits) was the best option after all. So that is what I will be doing starting in October, except it turns out that it really means 105 billable hrs/month and another 25 non-billable/month.

Firm deserves much kudos for going along with each of these proposals and not deciding that my wishy-washiness makes me clearly unemployable.

I have no idea how this will really play out in practice, but the firm has indicated that they are happy to consider periodic revisions if it isn't working out for me, which definitely eases some of the pressure. I'm hoping it will be a LOT better, but it's hard to say. Frankly, for the last few months I've only been billing 140/month anyway (with maybe 20 or so non-billable hours per month), so I don't know how much of a change this will really be. I've also gotten some great advice on boosting non-billable time. I didn't realize people were writing down time spent organizing their offices, reviewing their dockets, and so forth. One (really religious) guy even writes down all the time he spends on going to church and church activities, for crying out loud (under the umbrella of "business development" – koff koff). Anyway, so that's really cool.

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Little Baby Jr. is doing great. He fell asleep in my arms last week and stayed put all evening, the cute little munchkin. He also will now coo and almost laugh if you make faces and talk to him sweetly; really amazing considering his age.

A seems to have adjusted to his presence very well. When we went up to visit my grandma in August, she kept trying to tell her, "I'm a big sister, Great-Grandma" (it comes out "Gweat-Gwamma"), over and over and over. My grandma simply couldn't hear her, so finally we told her what A was saying – A turned to us and said, "No no no no. I am talking to Great-Grandma." Great-Grandma was very impressed that A was a big sister, which led A to tell her about it 10 more times, then start naming letters on Great-Grandma's bingo cards.

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Work right now is pretty stressful. I have a new-old client who has suddenly started giving us a ton of work, whereas before it was a rare trickle. I shall dub them "Really Big Corp." Really Big Corp. has decided they love/hate me, which makes my days all sorts of fun. They tell my bosses they really like me and that's why they now trust us with the work, but to me they mostly call or send really mean e-mails about this or that typo (seriously, we're talking about "two spaces after a period" instead of "one space" – now that's a rant for another day...one space being the standard for typing on a computer, but moi having adjusted to the legal preference for two spaces, it's been difficult for me to adjust to the client's "single space" command until I started find-and-replacing the two spaces).

The understanding is that once I start the new schedule, I will mostly just do this client's work as long as they keep sending it. That definitely fills the day, and for the most part is pretty cool. The work is my favorite kind, and I can definitely use the ego boost when they tell my bosses how much they like me, but sometimes it's a real beatdown. I enjoyed it today when they sent me a snippy e-mail asking me to use a certain format for e-mail subject lines – which I already WAS doing in all instances EXCEPT when responding to their e-mails in which they DID not use the specified format. Blah.

And that's pretty much what's going on!