After all of yesterday’s sturm und drang about me getting to work at 9:30, I did — and didn’t have anything to do until 11.
So I did a little more job searching. This might be a good time to go into public interest law. It would certainly save my sanity.
Well, at least you have job prospects.
Government work can be fun, but you do have to be careful, because the idiots and assholes tend to get stuck forever. Talk to everyone you can before taking a job just to make sure the boss isn’t a real beast. See my comment on “Well, that was weird,” for further explanation.
Government work is not only fun, but, in my (22+ years of) experience, is rewarding, gratifying, . . . all the good adjectives you can think of that don’t have to do with making you (monetarily) rich. I helped ensure that minority businesses would get a fair chance at government contracts; I helped prevent infringements on First Amendment rights; I helped protect taxpayers from various kinds of fraud. What I’m proudest of is, I helped protect children from abusive or neglectful parents. Forget the fancy law firms. Look to government or nongovernment public interest entities — you’ll be happier, I’m sure. Not to say that you’ll never encounter a jerk there (the worst boss I ever had — and I went to law school after having had another career) was in the government. But even he was fairly easy to work around or avoid, and, I repeat, the work itself was worth even putting up with him for a couple of years.
I’d love a government job. I spent two years as a temp for the NYC Law Department and loved the work. I only left because my adversaries were making my life utter hell, and going after me personally.
The last straw for me was when my mother died, and my cocounsel and I asked for a two-week continuance on our opposition brief because I’d missed a lot of time while she was in the hospital and wasn’t going to be able to finish on time.
When Ingrid, my cocounsel, came into my office in tears after she’d called our adversaries to get consent, I knew something was horribly wrong. They’d not only NOT consented, but wanted to see my time records, said that losing my mother was no reason to lose time at work because one of their aunts had died and he only lost a day for the funeral, and accused Ingrid of exploiting my mother’s death to get the continuance the magistrate had earlier rejected because Ingrid would be out of the country on the original date.
And then they repeated most of the same bullshit on the phone conference with the magistrate (except for the aunt stuff). Who was horrified, and granted our continuance.
Since there was no getting away from them in that division, I decided to leave the Law Department. Which is something I often regret.