I'm sitting in a very Melbourne-esque (read: mainstream London hipster, or as they say here 'antipodean') café called Look Mum No Hands! I feel right at home amongst the bicycles, students hunched over laptops, music ranging from motown to blues to indie...and of course great coffee. Then again London is always changing and I can't be sure this place is cool any more. What I can be sure about is that I'm comfortable hiding away here and starting my first blog.
As I've said in the About Me section, this is a way to keep my family and friends back home in Australia up to date about my goings-on. I've been working as a commercial lawyer in the City for a month now, and have been so tired and busy that the kindly emails asking how I am have started piling up. This may be a more detailed and efficient way of keeping everyone up to date. When I was younger, writing a diary was how I got through my worry-ful, self-absorbed adolescence, and I feel that a blog might, as an added bonus, similarly help me to cope with all the newness that I've encountered.
I moved here at the end of February, leaving my fiancé behind: today is our 8th anniversary and the first one we've spent apart. To celebrate we did our usual weekend activity, which has been watching as many House of Cards episodes together as the differing time zones allow.
I'm living in East London with three housemates: two other lawyers and a psychologist. Quite an intellectual household, but also a busy one, and I'm finding that we're very rarely all in the house at once. While I've lived out of home for many years now, this was my first move without my usual support system in place. I tried to embrace it, buying Ikea furniture, cracking open a beer and hammering away building myself wardrobes and bookshelves. I felt like a badass. I think it was the beer. Our house is styled "modern", which my housemate encapsulated beautifully: it feels like an office away from the office. Because of that, and because of my need to settle and 'nest', I went about making my room as cosy as possible as soon as I could. This required some ingenuity, as my room is 2.5m x 2.5m with the bed taking up most of the space.
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Work began with a two-week induction and I was relieved to find that my group of trainees are absolutely lovely. It took me a while to remember everyone's names (thank you Facebook!) but I found everyone to be relaxed, funny and self-deprecating, not the competitive intense lawyer-type that I was worried I might find. Maybe when I'm Alicia Florrick I'll hold my own amongst these lawyer-types, but at the very beginning of my first job as a lawyer, I needed to have friends I could be honest with, have a laugh with, and go through this together. I'm so glad I found them.
The past month has been tumultuous. I'm working 13 hour days on average, which I count as a blessing given the fact that some of my friends have been working until 1am every night. The ups are those few-and-far-between moments where I feel like I know what I'm doing. That has meant successfully co-organising a wine tasting night between solicitors and barristers, and extremely basic tasks like saving pdf files and naming them correctly. Which I didn't even do properly the first time, using the wrong date format. In other words, the things I've been doing 'right' have been nowhere near using the legal skills that I learned at university. This should have been obvious, with 50% of solicitors at my law firm not having a law degree - impossible in Australia, but highly common in the UK.
The downs comprise the almost constant struggle not to be overwhelmed and panic - I was so happy to find a "contemplation room" in the building, because it was a secret place that I could curl up into a ball and disappear from the world. Finding that this brought me joy was an uncomfortable discovery.
One of my best experiences so far took place last week. I felt that I was making so many embarrassing stupid mistakes - for example, I went past a Senior Associate's office, saw she wasn't in, said "DAMN" really loudly and spoke to her PA (secretary) about how I was going to track her down. Turns out she was in there, with the door open, within earshot. Thank god I only said 'damn'. I also made a joke to my supervisor which in retrospect was a bit too familiar - he had jokingly complained that the make-up artist for staff photos had criticised his messy hair and dark circles under his eyes. Later that day he mentioned he was booking a hair cut appointment, and I said "I hope you're also making an appointment for those bags under your eyes!" His surprise made me feel mortified - especially because it was only my second day! Getting the tone right with my supervisors and other lawyers adds another level of complexity to navigating these unchartered waters.
Anyway, feeling a bit blue, I had lunch with some of my trainee friends. I told them some of these incidences and how dumb I felt. What happened next was that each of the trainees ended up telling their own embarrassing stories, which made me laugh so hard I was in stitches!! One friend was asked to urgently print two documents, so he accidentally emailed them first, instead of printing them, then once he did print them, the documents fell all over the floor with unfortunately no page numbers. Being a good environmentalist, he sat there putting them back in order, and only delivered it half an hour later. Another friend was asked to speak to an associate about a matter. He pulls up the associate's staff photo on his computer to check who this person was. After their meeting, both he and the associate come back to his desk where the photo is lying there, unassumingly, on his computer screen. The associate says "Hey! That's me!" Another fantastic photo story involved another friend. We had just received confirmation that our staff photos were online. She clicks on her photo and it enlarges to the size of the screen. Her supervisor chooses that moment to walk past, sees her looking at her own photo and says "Why are you looking at a photo of yourself? That's rather vain isn't it?" Hahaha! Terrible, terrible.
What I found later is that these kinds of embarrassing encounters don't actually stop once you finish your training contract. An associate told me that he saw a new trainee stepping into a lift with a female partner (the kind of tough feminist lawyer who has had to break the glass ceiling on her way to the top). He tried to be casual and say "hey buddy" or "hey dude" but ended up accidentally combining the two words, and as the doors closed, he called out "HEY BOOB!" Haahahahaha!! Apparently the doors closed on the female partner's face - a look of shock and fury - so there was no time for him to save the situation.
The moral of my first 4 weeks has been that everyone is on the same journey as me, though everyone deals with it in their own way. I'm sure that after another 4 weeks a lot of these little things will feel even easier.
I hope to have a new blog post once a week, but I may do another one this Easter weekend to catch you all up! I miss you all so much and hopefully this way my life here will seem much less like a mystery :)
As I've said in the About Me section, this is a way to keep my family and friends back home in Australia up to date about my goings-on. I've been working as a commercial lawyer in the City for a month now, and have been so tired and busy that the kindly emails asking how I am have started piling up. This may be a more detailed and efficient way of keeping everyone up to date. When I was younger, writing a diary was how I got through my worry-ful, self-absorbed adolescence, and I feel that a blog might, as an added bonus, similarly help me to cope with all the newness that I've encountered.
I moved here at the end of February, leaving my fiancé behind: today is our 8th anniversary and the first one we've spent apart. To celebrate we did our usual weekend activity, which has been watching as many House of Cards episodes together as the differing time zones allow.
I'm living in East London with three housemates: two other lawyers and a psychologist. Quite an intellectual household, but also a busy one, and I'm finding that we're very rarely all in the house at once. While I've lived out of home for many years now, this was my first move without my usual support system in place. I tried to embrace it, buying Ikea furniture, cracking open a beer and hammering away building myself wardrobes and bookshelves. I felt like a badass. I think it was the beer. Our house is styled "modern", which my housemate encapsulated beautifully: it feels like an office away from the office. Because of that, and because of my need to settle and 'nest', I went about making my room as cosy as possible as soon as I could. This required some ingenuity, as my room is 2.5m x 2.5m with the bed taking up most of the space.
Managed to find a bookcase that was only 17cm deep!
Work began with a two-week induction and I was relieved to find that my group of trainees are absolutely lovely. It took me a while to remember everyone's names (thank you Facebook!) but I found everyone to be relaxed, funny and self-deprecating, not the competitive intense lawyer-type that I was worried I might find. Maybe when I'm Alicia Florrick I'll hold my own amongst these lawyer-types, but at the very beginning of my first job as a lawyer, I needed to have friends I could be honest with, have a laugh with, and go through this together. I'm so glad I found them.
Symbol of The City of London: The Gherkin
The past month has been tumultuous. I'm working 13 hour days on average, which I count as a blessing given the fact that some of my friends have been working until 1am every night. The ups are those few-and-far-between moments where I feel like I know what I'm doing. That has meant successfully co-organising a wine tasting night between solicitors and barristers, and extremely basic tasks like saving pdf files and naming them correctly. Which I didn't even do properly the first time, using the wrong date format. In other words, the things I've been doing 'right' have been nowhere near using the legal skills that I learned at university. This should have been obvious, with 50% of solicitors at my law firm not having a law degree - impossible in Australia, but highly common in the UK.
The downs comprise the almost constant struggle not to be overwhelmed and panic - I was so happy to find a "contemplation room" in the building, because it was a secret place that I could curl up into a ball and disappear from the world. Finding that this brought me joy was an uncomfortable discovery.
One of my best experiences so far took place last week. I felt that I was making so many embarrassing stupid mistakes - for example, I went past a Senior Associate's office, saw she wasn't in, said "DAMN" really loudly and spoke to her PA (secretary) about how I was going to track her down. Turns out she was in there, with the door open, within earshot. Thank god I only said 'damn'. I also made a joke to my supervisor which in retrospect was a bit too familiar - he had jokingly complained that the make-up artist for staff photos had criticised his messy hair and dark circles under his eyes. Later that day he mentioned he was booking a hair cut appointment, and I said "I hope you're also making an appointment for those bags under your eyes!" His surprise made me feel mortified - especially because it was only my second day! Getting the tone right with my supervisors and other lawyers adds another level of complexity to navigating these unchartered waters.
Anyway, feeling a bit blue, I had lunch with some of my trainee friends. I told them some of these incidences and how dumb I felt. What happened next was that each of the trainees ended up telling their own embarrassing stories, which made me laugh so hard I was in stitches!! One friend was asked to urgently print two documents, so he accidentally emailed them first, instead of printing them, then once he did print them, the documents fell all over the floor with unfortunately no page numbers. Being a good environmentalist, he sat there putting them back in order, and only delivered it half an hour later. Another friend was asked to speak to an associate about a matter. He pulls up the associate's staff photo on his computer to check who this person was. After their meeting, both he and the associate come back to his desk where the photo is lying there, unassumingly, on his computer screen. The associate says "Hey! That's me!" Another fantastic photo story involved another friend. We had just received confirmation that our staff photos were online. She clicks on her photo and it enlarges to the size of the screen. Her supervisor chooses that moment to walk past, sees her looking at her own photo and says "Why are you looking at a photo of yourself? That's rather vain isn't it?" Hahaha! Terrible, terrible.
What I found later is that these kinds of embarrassing encounters don't actually stop once you finish your training contract. An associate told me that he saw a new trainee stepping into a lift with a female partner (the kind of tough feminist lawyer who has had to break the glass ceiling on her way to the top). He tried to be casual and say "hey buddy" or "hey dude" but ended up accidentally combining the two words, and as the doors closed, he called out "HEY BOOB!" Haahahahaha!! Apparently the doors closed on the female partner's face - a look of shock and fury - so there was no time for him to save the situation.
The moral of my first 4 weeks has been that everyone is on the same journey as me, though everyone deals with it in their own way. I'm sure that after another 4 weeks a lot of these little things will feel even easier.
I hope to have a new blog post once a week, but I may do another one this Easter weekend to catch you all up! I miss you all so much and hopefully this way my life here will seem much less like a mystery :)
Great stuff, keep it up! I think "buddy" and "dude" was just his cover up story. He saw boobs and he said hey boobs, it's normal.)
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff, keep it up! I think "buddy" and "dude" was just his cover up story. He saw boobs and he said hey boobs, it's normal.)
ReplyDeleteHaha didn't think about that :P
ReplyDelete