Well...

It is 11.30 pm right now. I am nowhere near going home from my office. So I figured that my only consolation would be to smoke the cigarette I just bummed from the bossman in front of the gigantic NO SMOKING IN FRONT OF THE BUILDING sign. I gravitated towards this sign partly because the only people outside were two well-dressed white girls having drinks on the near-empty terrace of one of the fancy bars and two dark-skinned men a little farther away in the dark. I thought it would be safer to hang out near the girls, but their silly conversation was too much to take and I soon realized that the black guys were security guards making sure that the gigantic movie screen and related equipment put up in front of the building stays safe. After one of them asked me for a cigarette I felt the urge to share with them that I was still working and (so there is no misunderstanding) that my job sucked. The moment I made my whiny statement I realized that theirs (and those of the uniformed, silent cleaners who were diligently caressing the expensive marble floors underneath the palm trees in the Winter Garden with gigantic brooms) sucked way beyond mine. Reality check. I am just SO tired.

Words

I still can't get the commas right. I spent over 14 hours in the office yesterday and in the last email I sent out at 11.30 pm to a small number of people there was a typo for which I got a "talk." The bossman (generic name to describe any of my bosses) said that this was his only complaint about me and my work and he thought that I was a good lawyer and did a great job, but, really, it is the second time that there was a typo in one of my emails to a client and he just wants me to read them more carefully. He was very worried that I would get upset about this and I assured him that I wasn't, which is true, only because I really don't care. That I can't say, of course.

What does upset me, however, is that I have to use this horrible, nonsensical jargon again that I had also forgotten about. I am "turning documents," which means collecting and typing in everybody's comments on one of the monster documents that we are "drafting" (i.e. changing dates, numbers and definitions in precedent documents) and then sending them out. I cringe when I have "input" another "Notwithstanding the above," a "with respect thereto and in accordance with the definition thereof," a "provided that," or even a "for the avoidance of doubt" into the next "distro" (short for distribution, meaning an email to lots of people who won't read what they receive). It pains me to come up with those distorted, sick sentences, even if I know that this is probably inevitable when you try to put into words the sale of 500 million dollars worth of bonds secured by a bunch of other bonds and mortgages to investment banks and insurance companies.

I can convince myself not to actively hate doing this if the sun is shining, if someone was nice to me or if I get to go to my yoga class at 7 pm. I can even condition myself to care about the substance of my documents and make sure that I exercise a "degree of care that can reasonably be expected" of a human being who spent 14 hours straight in front of a computer monitor. What I can't do is seriously worry for one second at 11.30 pm that some math geek at one of the rating agencies will see a typo in my cover email.

Commas

There are a number of reasons why I dislike what I do for a living. One of them is that I am not particularly interested in the subject matter. I could live with that though because at times I manage to get a certain kind of (very limited) satisfaction from just solving a problem or understanding something totally esotheric and removed from everyday reality. This is how I feel maybe 20% of the time. I still want to do a good job and I want my bosses to be satisfied with my performance. And they seem to be - for the most part. But there is a quality, which I don't have - "attention to detail" is how they describe it in job postings; more accurately I would describe it as an "anal-obsessive fight with commas." I have nightmares about heaps of commas and semi-colons attacking me, wanting to be erased or added in random places in 300-page documents. So you leave out one and that's it. It doesn't matter if you can think something through, draft a document (don't get me started on the bizarre meaning that "drafting" has over here) or make an annoying client happy if you lose the fight with the commas. Winning that fight is what makes you a good lawyer here. I had forgotten that and I was reminded of it today.

The World Financial Center

Is where my office is. I like watching the people around here. A lot of them are tourists, who come in to see the Winter Garden and the supposed center of the financial world. The big offices are mostly banks and other financial institutions offices (Merryl Lynch, American Express) and also some law firms and other lesser institutions. It is easy to recognize the investment bankers. They tend to be men in their 20s or 30s, they move around in groups of 4-5, they are mostly white and, sometimes, Indian (from what I have observed though the Indians tend to move around in pairs more), sometimes Asian, never black. Now that it is warmer out, they take off their jackets to reveal white, off-white or light blue shirts (sometimes you see a pink shirt - that is probably the English guy in the group) with matching ties.

The snippets of conversations that I overhear are usually uninteresting, though difficult to ignore because another characteristic of men in large groups and expensive suits tends to be loudness. Yesterday though, as I walked into the elevator dazed out from a long day of uninterrupted staring at the screen, I overheard one of the more interesting ones. Two Indian guys (probably some super-smart engineer or physicist kids on H-1B visas) with strong Indian accents were talking about how one of their white, American colleagues got fired by their Japanese boss (they work for Nomura, a Japanese bank) for making repeated references to Pearl Harbor in the course of a meeting such as "we don't want another Pearl Harbour, do we?" Apparently, that is not such a funny subject in Japan...it was interesting how these two guys were so happy about it: they totally identified with the Japanese sensitivity and thought that their boorish American colleague deservedly got the sack.

I need to leave now. I have spent way to many hours at the office this week.

P.S.

From my highrise office I have a particularly good view of how the weather changes every few minutes...earlier the snowflakes caught in some strange whirlwind and complete fog and now amazing sun and the ships and the Statue of Liberty are back in view. Should bring a camera, but then I would really turn into one of those blogger girls who take bad pictures of uninteresting things and think thaht someone should care...

May have lost many battles, but won the war

Last night I received an envelope from Citibank. It was a thick envelope. Hands shaking slightly, with a lump in my throat, but with the hopefulness of a student who just got a thick letter back from one of the colleges she applied to, I opened it up - and there it was! A Citibank platinum credit card. With a very high credit limit. It may sound idiotic, but I felt like calling up all the various call center and store-card people who had rejected me - to let them know that I don't need them because I can go through the back door and use my law firm to help me become a real person over here.

Of course, I should really not be proud of myself. For all the bad things I say about my clients, some of my bosses and the corporate world in general (on a daily basis, might I add), I am just like them - taking advantage of the "good things" it has to offer. David thinks that I am prejudiced against rich people. I think that is true. That is partly why I make a point of talking to the poorest people (my mail guy and cleaning personnel friends) with the most attention. I assume that they are good and interesting people because they are poor and ignored. So I give them a chance. Meanwhile, I assume that my bosses and clients are bad and boring people because they make a lot of money and are not shy about it. So I don't give them a chance. Meanwhile, I am a hypocrite and a fraud.

This is only partly true. Long years of experience with investment bankers have left no doubt in my mind that pretty much anyone who attends an Ivy League business school in the U.S. (regardless of what kind of person they might have been prior to that) is injected with some kind of special serum that turns them into pompous, unbearably arrogant and unpleasant a-holes, who from then on remain convinced that the world would stop spinning without them. This firm belief of mine would be difficult (if not impossible) to shake. However, I maybe should be a little more patient with corporate lawyers...after all they (we) are slaves to those described in the previous sentence and that, in itself, is punishment enough.