Monday 17 August 2009

Fortunately, I'm one of those folks who, when bad things happen, immediately attempt to self-improve rather than drink heavily before crying into their own hands. So when I saw my ex-girlfriend with her new lawyer chap in Greenwich last Saturday, I shut the sick feeling out, didn’t shove my face into the nearest and fastest car fender but forced myself to walk back to my apartment, compose myself, and go out for my first session of Bikram Yoga in Old Street.

Bikram was great. A room full of hot women, being hot women. Lycra and firm muscles at £13 for an hour and a half; it's way better value than a strip club where you get financially hammered for the prospect of watching an Eastern European "medical student" who's just making ends meet dance badly and get naked. I've never been comfortable in strip clubs and avoid at all cost. The downside of yoga is that it does appear to be populated by the most serious women/ gay men I've encountered in London. All scowls when I lost balance and crashed over. No chat in the wind-down room replete with hippy tea and incense.

Afterwards, I felt in a good enough state to meet my friend James and drink heavily before going home to cry into my own hands. I may be miserable, but I'm flexible.

Sunday 2 August 2009

A Sunday looking into the mirror, worrying about the week to come.

I'm acutely aware that I have not commenced a particularly onerous task I was given about two weeks ago by Head of Department. I realise that if I start the work, I'd get through it relatively painlessly. But I cannot seem to do so and have instead filled the previous two weeks with work I considered less fiddly, irritating or in acceptable law firm parlance, "challenging".

HOD didn't give me a time limit, it's not urgent and perhaps that's the problem. No, that's not the problem; the real issue is fear of failure. I'm approaching two years qualified and I'm still held back by fear. Fear of exposure as incompetent, unintelligent, a fake, a charlatan. I've asked around my friends and select colleagues and this is common. Everyone who is ostensibly confident, determined and focused, cool in crises and definite in decision is secretly fearful.

So if I've got the maths correct, that means we're all charlatans.

Monday 13 July 2009

Apologies for my absence, Dear Reader. I've no excuses other than a general malaise seeping through my bones combined with a number of alcohol related social engagements. And I'm an awful typist when drunk.

I spoke with my good friend James today about the need to remove ourselves from law. We tried to come up with some business ideas, something creative that could take us away from this profession of the needless middleman.

Our ideas were:

1. Importing and exporting goods from Saudi Arabia. (Not women);

2. "Enhancing" swimwear for men;

3. Self-peeling vegetables;

4. A moped that turns into a robotic woman; and

5. A cow that converts CO2 into alcomilk.

We're not sure of the science relating to No 3 and No 5, so we'll need to run them by some technical bods, but the rest seem pretty sound. Watch this space.

In other news, Evil Room Mate has a weird mark around her left eye, some kind of blood blister that she's no doubt aggravated through her episodic scratching and twitching. I'd find it amusing although Secretary Number Nine laughingly asked me this afternoon if I'd been "smacking her around".

She was only half joking. A brave half-joke given her upcoming appraisal.

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Another day, another speck of black on my soul.

This afternoon, one of the trainees and I were on a call with an opponent, not another lawyer but a smaller family-run entity that happens to have crossed paths with a client. The merits of my client's complaint were pretty straight forward; the small company on the other side had slipped up and breached an agreement, their liability obvious.

However, when explaining this to the middle-aged lady who manages the small concern, she began to cry at the hopelessness of their situation. She explained that her company has barely broken even over the last financial year, that she and her husband have ploughed their savings into the business and are on the verge of going under.

I pointed out that I have been instructed to pursue what is owed to my client, in line with the penalty clause in the agreement. My opponent cried some more. This was all dealable, I'm pretty dead to the emotions of an opponent, no matter their financial and indeed mental state. I was mostly irritated that it's hard to convey information on a telephone call to a sobbing person. What startled me as I ended the call, opponent still choking on tears, was that the trainee (male) started crying.

Genuinely unable to restrain myself I asked,"What the fuck are you doing?"

He apologised and mumbled something about the situation reminding him of growing up in the north of England. Lucky for him, Evil Room Mate was at an external meeting. Locking my office door, I told him to sort himself out and to never, ever let anyone in the firm see him displaying an emotional weakness. It would end his career at the firm.

He apologised again and asked if I ever feel bad about what I do, paring money away from weaker opponents. I replied that as a trainee I sometimes considered the morality of a given situation. However, every time I felt overly negative about my facilitating big business, I'd pop across the road for an expensive latte.

Pretty soon, I explained, the discomfort of others just made me fancy a coffee.

Monday 29 June 2009

The weekend got a little out of hand. Last week my cousin Stephanie, the manager of the wonderful Leon restaurant in New York's East Village got in touch. Steph notified me that a family friend, Erica, was in London and in need of a tour guide. Erica who I had never met but who happened to be a twenty year old college girl on a summer tour of Europe. You may be able to see where this is going.

I met Erica in Camden yesterday afternoon, thinking Camden would be a fun place for a young American to spend some time. Or at least buy some t-shirts from the market or some drugs or whatever 20 year old American girls do. Erica was a pretty good looking girl, although the perfunctory getting to know you chat over late lunch revealed nothing but average. I went through the pattern of asking her about herself and pretty much zoned out for each of the answers. We then wandered the market and looked at weird shit you don't need and, later still, met my friend Henry for a few drinks.

Drinks segued into a later drinks and I really thought I would be able to palm Erica off on Henry and get out of there. However, while I was buying us yet more cocktails, Erica leaned in and started kissing me and I'm sorry to say I went along with it. She then completely took the lead and asked if we could go back to my place. At that point, as Henry seemed happy chatting with a couple of gothic looking girls, I just accepted the situation and got out of there. Back at my soulless bachelor pad we got naked and down to it. Afterwards, as we were pretty hammered we thought that rather than sleep, more drinks and more sex was the best course of action.

In summary I completely failed to sleep, have a hangover, yet somehow managed to run a meeting today without anyone noticing I was on the verge of blacking out or vomiting in the recycling bin again.

Apart from a bit more cash and a change of scenery my life has not progressed since my university years almost a decade ago.

Monday 22 June 2009

I have a weekend hangover and a meeting in fifty five minutes. I'm three coffees in and still have no motivation to attend. All the caffeine has done is make me sweat and feel irritable. The meeting is with a client from the gas sector who wants us to review a contract he has with the Ukrainian company he provides with piping. He's Russian and scares the crap out of me. The contract scares the crap out of me. What if I fuck it up? Will I end up with polonium-210 in my sandwich? That would be fantastic. I screw a contract up due to a heavy weekend and then my hair starts falling out and I end up coughing up blood in a cancer ward. That would be completely typical.

Still, he never queries the bills.

Saturday 13 June 2009

I've been given yet another PC after my old one stopped working. Having returned from a few days out of the office, the bastard thing wouldn't turn on, or rather it did turn on but then wouldn't load up. "Boot?" I'm not very technical.

First I wondered if my being disconnected from the system was the firm's subtle way of firing me. A few days absence always leads me to think I've screwed something up before I left and have been axed in absentia. I should probably see a psychologist about this paranoia. Anyway, I called IT who sent a little man down to fix the computer. He turned it on and off a few times to no avail. He then ran off and got me a new PC while I made a coffee then complained to Evil Room Mate about how our IT support need to sort their act out.

In removing the old PC, the IT man found a lot of congealed brown stuff underneath it. This brought to my mind a certain incident with a full cup of coffee, malcoordination and my desk which happened a few days ago. Sipping my coffee while trying not to look guilty, I let the IT man form his own conclusions about why the PC had stopped working.

Evil Room Mate watched me suspiciously then made a note in her little black diary.