Dude. I am so not feeling this today.

It is Saturday.

I am at work.

I am alone.

I am unproductive.

That all being said, the day has been a pretty good one. Extensive shoe and blond-isme therapy this morning. Helped.

But now, aargh, there is this.

I really feel like there ought to be something about my job that I enjoy. Something about the actual job itself (not just people I work with, the location of my office, or accessibility to good vending machine candy). There really must be something.

Nope.

There is nothing I actually like doing at my job.

There are plenty of things I don't mind doing, but actually deriving pleasure from them? Forget about it.

I think it is because the profession of lawyering is such that even the most mundane of tasks has the potential for becoming a stressful ordeal which takes years off of your life. For instance, the three line cover letter that requires four drafts and review by three sets of eyes, and is so nit-picked for purely stylistic (preference) reasons, that it nearly blows the Fed Ex deadline for the day.

Time it should have taken: 6 minutes.
Time it ended up taking: 7 hours, 42 minutes (capped off with a breathless run to literally grab the FedEx guy, promise him your first born, a cut of the royalties on your first book, a ham sandwich etc., to hand him your letter.)

Or, in a slightly less mundane, but regardless not-so-unusual assignment, a simple research project. At least, when it is described to you it is called "simple" and "straightforward" and "casual."

"Look into this..."

"Get back to me in an hour or so..."

Inevitably there are kinks and complications. Judicial precedent unforeseen and the like. A scouring of every data base known to man required. You supplicate, the assigning partner on high grants you a two hour reprieve. Annotated by this small throwaway comment:

"Oh yeah, and just throw your finding in an e-mail...."

Throw, huh?

So scurrying back to your hovel you go. Two hours won't be enough, but you'll have to make it work.

Then, about an hour and 40 minutes in, partner swings by and say, "Yeah, why don't you make that a formal memo. And you know, while your at it, why don't you cc ...." [Insert laundry list of other partners' names here, culminating with a reference to the head of the firm.]

Oh yeah, we are in trouble now. Trailing comment here being, "Yeah, just take care of that before you leave tonight..."

Now, as casual as this comment was, there is of course, no way, that any memo (especially any memo I produced) could be of acceptable quality to send to the head of the firm. An e-mail memo, "thrown together" as it were, is especially unacceptable. The task of starting and finishing this memo has now gone from mundane, to standard, to pressure filled, to unending, to, what BigLaw firms euphemistically like to call "a potentially career limiting move." Umm, yeah. Looks like a certainty to me.

Looking for an escape route, but getting summarily dismissed because the head of the firm thinks I am an imbecile was not exactly the one I had in mind.

Be careful what you wish for?