Girl and City

Today was my first actual day of work at LawyerMan’s office.

It was insane.

This is a one-lawyer office with two assistants, not including me. When I arrived at 8:50 this morning, the older assistant sat me in her comfy swivel chair, told me I would be using her computer, and logged me in. She shares the office with a younger assistant, but she has a much bigger desk and faces a huge window.
This was pretty sweet, or so I thought.

After I logged in and familiarized myself with their email system, the older assistant went to help the younger assistant. They spent all morning closing some deal, so I had to field all her calls and emails.
She gets a lot of fucking calls, let me tell you.

And not only did I not receive any orientation, other than being logged into her Outlook, I had to handle all these Chinese clients, because it’s a bilingual office.
Now, my Chinese is passable in conversational settings, but I don’t know any law or even professional jargon. And most of these clients were either old, or anal, or both. By my fourth phone call, I had been verbally harassed twice. There were these two particular clients who kept calling and just screaming and cursing into the phone. In Chinese! If it wasn’t so absolutely terrifying, it would have been pretty hysterical.
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My first day back in University Town and
OF COURSE I miss my bus and have to wait in the rain,
OF COURSE it would be raining because this place has the worst weather I have ever known (if I close my eyes, maybe I could pretend I am in Britain),
OF COURSE I am late for a 9:30am meeting at work because we never used to have 9:30am meetings and I used to saunter in at 9:50am,
OF COURSE I have nothing to do at work so I blog while I wait for my apple to warm to room temperature (it was in the fridge) before I eat it,
OF COURSE I was too lazy to cook when I got in last night so all I brought for lunch was one unfulfilling sandwich and now I have to run across campus to buy over-priced, mass-produced fast food unfit for human consumption. (more…)

One of my favourite books by Sophie Kinsella is Can You Keep a Secret?. The reason is simple: the heroine of this particular story has some secrets. Mostly derived from a few little lies. Ok, maybe more than a few. See? I do it too. But who doesn’t?

We all have secrets, from little lies that we tell, or what we don’t tell. We already know there are plenty of things I don’t tell. Here are some more.

Secrets from my boss:

• I told the CEO at Not-A-Real-Job that I wasn’t doing anything this summer other than this internship. Complete lie. As you all know, I am desperately secretly searching for another job.
• He is obviously going to find out when he receives a call from places I have applied to because I put him down as one of my references. I probably should have told him that he is one of my references. I also said I’d been an intern with him for two months. Slight lie, considering I started last month. Hmm…

Secrets from my parents:

• My parents think I have never bombed a single course in university¹ and that I am awesome at science. Neither of these beliefs are correct. I did bomb a course (Cell Biology), which just goes to show I am not awesome at science. I just left the field before it became obvious. My parents desperately want to believe I am awesome at science because 90% of the people in my family are serious scientists, and they want me to join their ranks. Imagine their disappointment when I went to business school instead.
• My mom thinks I am trying to lose weight. Not because I said I was on a diet or anything, just because she thinks I should. So it’s really her fault for making assumptions. When she is not home, I eat ice cream. Lots and lots of it. She also thinks I go swimming every other day. I do not.
• That stain on the bathroom rug that my mother loves? The dog peed there. But it was because I locked the dog in the bathroom when she was getting really annoying. My parents think the dog just went crazy on her own (which does happen sometimes) and I’ve never corrected their notion. It’s not like the dog is going to tell on me.
• One time, my phone dialed my home number on its own while I was out clubbing at 2am (it must have been pressed against something in my purse and hit speed dial). All my parents heard on the resulting answering machine message was “loud noise” (their words, not mine – my guess is it was very loud music). They called me back and when I saw that “Home” was calling, I didn’t answer because I was drunk and I didn’t want them to know I was still out clubbing. They thought I’d been kidnapped or something terrible had happened to me and the recording was all I could get out, so they called the police. I never told them the truth. I switched phones after that incident.

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1. The Asian definition of bombing: getting below an 80 – or a 3.7 out of 4.0. [↩]

“So… you have no legal experience?”
“No.”
He cocked an eyebrow as he scanned my resume once more. He was going to dismiss me. In a last ditch effort to make myself seem more qualified, I added, “But I do have office experience. I’m very good at organizing documents, doing research, that sort of thing. And I have great computer skills, since I work in IT. I type really, really fast,” I said while bobbing my head up and down to drive home the point.
He studied me again, one eyebrow still arched slightly higher than the other, and slowly nodded his head. Once. “I see…” he said carefully.
“To tell you the truth, I am really hoping that this legal assistant position will turn full-time after the candidate has been trained. And the problem is, well, by the time you are trained, the summer will be over and you’ll be gone.”
The job posting had said nothing about this turning into a full-time position. It had said that a legal assistant was needed to fill in for someone for a few months. I folded my hands in my lap and considered this new piece of information. “I see.”
“I know that you want some real-life experience, but I really don’t want to train you for the summer and then have to train someone else when you are finally able to do real work for me.”
“I understand,” I said. We were both silent for a minute. I tried one more time. “I will need to intern during the summers while I”m in law school – I could come here every summer.”
But it was clear he wasn’t looking for someone like me. He showed me out of the office without so much as a handshake. As I rode the elevator down, I tried to tell myself that it was his loss – if he wasn’t going to pay me, what harm could it do to have another helper around? I’m a smart girl, I could make myself useful. And yet, he was letting me get away.
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Every time I do not get a job, I wonder what I did wrong. It’s not unlike being rejected for a second (or third or fourth) date, except in this case, “It’s not you, it’s me” doesn’t fly¹. Sometimes I think it’s because I didn’t prepare enough for the interview, or I wasn’t energetic enough, didn’t let them see how passionate (read: desperate) I was about getting the job. But most of the time, I settle on the idea that they saw right through my charade, that I wasn’t really in it for the long run, I just wanted to be paid for the summer.

But is it really that bad to not know what I’m meant to do when I’m twenty? I mean, isn’t that the point of these summer internships – to figure out if it’s really for you? And yet if you tell an interviewer that – that you’re not sure if this really is what you want to do, you’re just testing out the waters – they’ll be yelling out “Next” before you can say “Give me a chance.” So, I play by the rules and pretend that I have wanted to be an accountant/financial analyst/marketing specialist/advertising assistant since kindergarten, when every other (normal) kid wanted to be a policeman/woman or a firefighter.

So, inspired by Jamie Ann, I have decided to put together a list of jobs that I know I would enjoy:

• Ice cream/gelato taste tester. With my abundant experience (over six years) in consuming ice cream of varying flavours (from ginger to hazelnut to strawberry rhubarb), I am sure I can discern what will be a hit or a flop. Although, how could anything sweet and creamy be a flop?
• Food critic. Dining at fine restaurants and then ripping into their cooking skills? I can do that. I practically do already. I just need to be paid for it.
• A permanent judge on the Japanese Iron Chef. I’d be much better than those amateur foodies (actors/actresses, voice actors/actresses) they bring in.
• Personal shopper for Carrie-Bradshaw-esque girls. Buying beautiful clothes and shoes and accessories with someone else’s money? And getting paid to do it? Hells yeah!
• Part-time driver. You know how cars don’t function as well if they’ve been sitting idle for a long time? This is of particular concern to people who own fancy little sports cars or expensive manual cars of the European variety. I can drive them! I mean, these people never own less than four cars, so once in a while, I can come by and take one of their cars out for a drive.
• Exclusive purse promoter. Need me to subtly introduce your new limited-stock high-end purse to society (in other words, wear the purse to select shopping meccas in the world)? I can do that. Fab purses, airfare and accommodations to international locations, and the potential to meet some very good-looking people included.

Know anyone who’s hiring?

1. Except when they tell you you’re over-qualified, which hasn’t happened to me yet since I do not even have a bachelor’s. [↩]