Culture Shock
In my former life, I was a lawyer. Not a do-gooder lawyer, a big-firm-working slug of a lawyer.
So, as you can imagine, making the switch has incurred some culture shock. I'm not sad about the switch, when I lost my job in April, my major feeling was, "Oh thank God." I mean, money and that, but sometimes the money is not worth it. I'm perfectly happy, believe me, to have taken the pay cut to move into something that doesn't make me feel like my career makes me an actively bad person. I am finding, however, that there are a few things I miss:
- The Hours. Okay, I know how strange this sounds. And no, I do not mind being home by 6 or 6:30 every night, nor do I miss spending nights at work because something came up in some lawsuit that's been going on for nine years (oh, antitrust) and ohmigod it has to be taken care of right now, so yes, I will bill 28 hours. Straight. But I miss... I don't know, the flexibility. The knowledge that if things all happened at once, I could just work longer and get it all done and get paid for my time. Things all kind of happened at once last week at work and I found myself really wishing that I could just stay until 9 and make some real progress instead of being confined to my 8 hours-- an awful lot of which are taken up with meetings. (Seriously, I got to work on Thursday, checked my calendar, and saw that I was in meetings solidly from 9 am until 2 pm. The hell?) I was complaining about this to my mother, and she was like, well, why don't you just stay late on Thursday to get things done and leave early on Friday? Okay, but that doesn't actually give me more hours. Technically, of course, we can get overtime, but when you've only been at a job for a month or so, and you want to prove that you can take what's thrown at you, you don't want to be asking them to pay you more because you can't finish it in the time you have. Or, at least, I don't. So... I might be doing a little old school pro bono this weekend. [sigh]
- Free Stuff. I know how that sounds. But seriously, it's the little things. I used to love walking into the kitchen at work and finding an endless supply of free drinks. Now, you're telling me I have to take a pay cut and pay for my own Diet Coke? [sigh]
- The Law. I do miss the actual law, a little bit, sometimes. What can I say? I like rules. Luckily, I still do some pro bono immigration, so I get a little bit of it. For a couple of hours a month. [sigh]
I'm sure I'll find other things as time goes on, but it's a little surprising to me that there are things I miss. I wouldn't go back, but I really thought I was ready to just turn my back on it and be done with the whole thing. Life's just full of little surprises.
