I have been a blog neglectorerer lately.

Suckage.

Work has been busy and intense.  I tend to get really into my work.  I seem to be incapable of ‘phoning it in’.

This can actually be a hindrance in certain situations.

For instance, let us say that a project I am working on suffers a minor set back for whatever reason.  I have these moments where I feel like it is the end of the world.  A key email got eaten by a spam filter and I am now on top of a deadline without feedback and things won’t go the way I expected them to, and good god I have nothing else.

And then I sit in my office and cry because I am so fucking frustrated and apparently still at an age where I cannot always roll with the punches.

Before I went to law school, I worked at a market research company where the expectation was that you would pretty much do a half-assed job.  Only I didn’t get that memo.  And my boss didn’t get the memo that I gave a shit.  And the person who trained me didn’t think to add, “Oh by the way, [Athena's Mom] just phone it in–if you can’t get the information you need, just make something up that sounds plausible.”  I ended up tackling my tasks in that job much like I had tackled all of my academic pursuits: intensely.   I worked my ass off, didn’t cut corners, and became a real bitch around deadlines.

A couple of years later I was talking with one of my friends from that job about our time with the company.  I mentioned how the quality department always made me rewrite substantial parts of my reports, and how it always annoyed me that they removed all of my stylistic changes (changes that I implemented to make the whole damn report more readable– you know, shorter sentences, tight and precise language).  I also whined how people who just cut and pasted information into existing reports never lost points with the quality department.  And my friend was all like “duh! You were supposed to cut and paste.”

Oh.

It just never had occurred to me to do things the easy way.  When my boss said write up a report, I thought she meant write a report the way that a professor means write a report:  from scratch, with clear and concise writing, using information gleaned from empirical analysis and not your own ass.  So that is what I did.

My boss, on the other hand, really meant just phone it in, churn out the product with as little effort as possible– our customers don’t care about style or accuracy– they want uniformity.  Make your work look just as bad as your co-workers, basically.

There is a great aphorism for these kinds of situations– you can’t get pizza from a Chinese restaurant.  And there I was, in a cube farm of people phoning it in until the economy improved, they got into grad school, their boyfriends proposed, a job in finance opened up, etc.; ordering my pizza from bosses who had nothing to give but egg rolls.

In my mind, I figured that if I did not get into law school– I needed this job as a stepping stone.  So I spent time honing my writing skills on those damn reports and bugging my bosses to train us in Microsoft Access.

And for that reason, I never quite fit in at the office or felt happy in that job.

So fast forward to now– where my job is basically an all you can eat pizza buffet that never closes.

I guess my point is, that in the end law school was worth it– even if my blogging suffers.  And I need a Xanax.