The power of no

As those who know me in real life know, I ‘ve spent these last few months on what is proving to be an enormous project, made more complicated by TMUMCITW.  It has progressively gone from a strong cup of tea after a meeting, to a few quiet sobs of frustration in the toilets, to, finally, full-fledged waterworks at my desk earlier this week after just one too many oh-so-polite emails.  

It really is getting to the point where enough is enough, and where something has to be done.  So today, when the latest madcap, poorly-scoped idea came through, I said no,  I wasn’t going to do it and I left it at that.  I hung up the phone and ignored the emails for the rest of the day.

 And it felt good.

On inspiration and perspiration

There’s that old quote by Thomas Edison, that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine perspiration – or something along those lines.  Working with The Most Useless Management Consultants In The World (TMUMCITW), I have come to see several sides of the saying.  TMUMCITW certainly have lots of great ideas (even if most seem to be off a template that someone else in their office has prepared for something similar eons and eons ago), and, quite obviously, no idea how to implement them.  There was a moment of unintended hilarity when, after spouting off the names of lots of potential special contributors to a project, who were discussed, dismissed, and selected over quite a long period of time, it emerged that there was absolutely no concrete plan as to how to contact them – short of trusty old Google.

I wonder if the high flying management consultants are a bit like the high flying academics who manage to cobble enough grants, scholarships and fellowships to live while studying – never having had to do the tedious, menial work that is part of any large undertaking, or to worry about such trivial concerns as budgets, or the time of support staff.    Inspiration and talent is all very well, but having no conception of the work required to bring the vision into the reality is not only a recipe for failure, but for immense dislike of you from the people who have to turn your vision into something practical.  Even if it’s just the poor sod doing your proofreading or trying to work out your layout instructions.

Certainly, TMUMCINW have gone on my trusty blacklist of people and places I’ll never work for or hire.  Even if, in the case of the latter, one day, far in the future, I am a CEO of a large corporate player or the Secretary of a major government Department and I have to come into the office at 3am to burn their tender document  before the Board of Directors or the Minister gets to read it.

And considering how expensive they are, I’m sure even if I don’t manage to burn the hard copy, delete the electronic copy off the server, and misdirect the representatives coming to do the pitch to the wrong building (preferably the wrong city, actually, somewhere like Alma-ata or Tashkent without reliable communication), I could still put together a cohesive argument that I think that they don’t represent “value” to the shareholder/taxpayer.

In a way, being a lawyer, I’m quite glad that I qualified doing Articles, because it meant that I had an understanding of the mechanics and minutiae of the more trivial details of a legal career – from haggling with Court Registry staff (begging is surprisingly effective, not to mention faking an asthma attack when you reach the door 2 minutes past filing time)  to knowing the most direct route to the nearest dry cleaner to being able to unjam a photocopier using nothing but my wits and a rusty paper clip at 2 in the morning.  Nobody, no matter who they are in the organisation, is too precious to do the binding – and in some ways, the Partners did seem more human, because you knew that they had been there before, and they knew what it was like.  It’s almost a bit of a shame that there is a push for more structured  “professional” training – though that certainly is needed – because I think that much of the benefit of doing Articles, like doctors doing Residencies, is being able to experience the “big picture” of the reality of practice, without just going straight in to write advice.

But on the other hand, I’ve also known just as many people who worked a lot harder than any of the high flyers, but never had that “spark.”  Some have been very successful (more so than many talented layabouts), but they never had that special something that made them unique – and though they made it almost to the top, they never got right there.  And they put an enormous amount of additional effort into getting there to – which, in some ways, made the victory all the sweeter – though they’re noticeably more exhausted than anyone else in the same job.

Is there a point to this post?  No, probably not.  Just letting off steam, and reminding myself that I will never be blase about the amount of work that goes behind turning a vision into reality, and that, really, without that little spark of talent, all the hard work in the world, though it will get you 99% there, the elusive 1% is still hanging there, out of reach – but even so, it’s still a really good effort.

The vagaries of time

I called one of the recruiters I dealt with earlier in the year today, to enquire about a job advertisment that his firm I had placed.  After much polite humming and haaing, it was quite apparent that I wasn’t quite up to the mark for the job, and he was too polite to tell me so directly.  I don’t remember  what I said precisely, but in the context of an observation of the (still) quiet job market, it was something along the lines of “I know it’s not 2007 anymore” – when the market was a little more active.

“Yes,” he said, a trifle too cheerfully, “if you’d come to me with your CV back then, I’d have got you five offers within a week.”

Leaving aside the quite blatant flattery, it did make me think about timing, and luck, and how, life has a way of turning out how it’s supposed to – even if it doesn’t make much sense, or it doesn’t seem to matter at the time.    The first time I thought about it was when I realised that had I done my Articles even one year earlier or one year later, I wouldn’t have had nearly as good a time – simply because I had the good fortune in my year to have the combination of fabulous fellow Articled Clerks who were lovely people, not remotely interested in the same legal practice areas I was, and at a time in the economic cycle (and the firm’s fortunes), that there was plenty of work for us and we were all kept on after our first year.  We’ve all left that firm, and none of us to law firms, but that is by the by.

I’ve been thinking about the same point a lot lately.   I haven’t been blogging much  because I’ve been working on quite a difficult project – made more challenging by possibly the Most Useless Management Consultants On Earth.  I’ve never had a particularly high opinion of the big-firm management consultancies, because in my limited experience they weren’t very good at listening to their clients or their clients’ needs  but very good at slotting their names into a their pre-prepared templates and charging mightily for the privilege.   I suppose it comes from hiring terribly bright people who have never been anything but consultants, or had very much practical experience -  and have no experience of how to implement any of their terribly bright (and terribly unworkable) ideas, and never had to do the legwork themselves, or ever had to keep an eye on the budget.

I look on the bright side, though – the less they do, or, more accurately, the more they blithely shove onto us, the more I’m learning.  Even if it’s  how not to treat clients or run an event – and most especially, having a great-looking set of templates and precedents isn’t much use when it’s quite clear you have no idea what you are putting in them.    And no matter how difficult it seems, and how confusing, and the times I come home and simply fall into bed from exhaustion and the times I feel like locking myself into the toilets at work for a nice quiet cry out of frustration, maybe this project is the whole reason I am in this job, and why I am still here.  Maybe I will look back and think of it as a turning point.

Certainly I have an enormous appreciation for movie producers and project managers in general after all this – after all, they have to keep everything turning but people only seem to notice the individual talents involved – whether the director, the cinematographer, the actors, the costume designer, the art director, etc, etc.  As a lawyer, and previously only having been one of the “parts” in any large production, it’s certainly given me enormous insight on just how frustrating it must be to clients if you don’t seem to have a clue about the other considerations in their mind.

Time, and fate, and destiny also raised its head as I was thinking about the last round of disheartening job rejection emails – and how, in the last few months, almost every time I’ve been feeling completely down in the dumps because of the seemingly endless rejections, something positive peeps around the corner, and my mood lifts from the doldrums.  One time it was a recruiter I’d been in contact with, who rang to ask if I was interested in a short (8 week) contract.  Another time, a spontaneous enquiry resulted in a lovely chat with a specialist legal recruiter in an area I really am quite interested in (she didn’t have anything going, but she was very nice and I got some great practice and plenty of ideas for improving my CV and application-letter writing).

On the way home tonight, I realised yet another thing – though I left my most recent job at what I felt was a hideously inconvenient time -  I’m starting to feel that it was meant to be – not for me, precisely, but for my successor and The Boss.  They’ve had to move offices, and such a massive undertaking is certainly much better with a Chucker than a Packrat!

So maybe this was meant to be, for me – at this time, at this place, or even if this isn’t precisely what I’m meant to be doing – it might be because whatever I’m supposed to do next,  I’m not supposed to do it yet.

Spring is sprung ….

There’s something cheering about the change of seasons and the lengthening of the days, even if winter seems determined to have a last gasp in the guise of gales and storms.  Though, in material terms, nothing has really changed for me personally since the beginning of financial year,  things do seem to be looking up – hopefully they’ll continue to do so!

Song sung blue

Is it weird to feel down at the turn of the financial year?  Of course, in other years I’ve been too busy with exams and essays and such to really notice , but this year, for the first time in a while, I have felt unaccountably down.  Probably, since it’s winter here, it mght be a touch of SAD, and I’ve been vitamin D deficient for a while  (less bad than it was, but it’s still quite low).  It’s quite odd.  

Maybe it’s the financial goal-setting, the inevitable disbelief as one opens one’s group certificate and wonders where all the money went.  There is the disheartening realisation that one is as far away from financial independence as ever, and that, courtesy of the battering of the financial markets, one would really have been better off going on extravagant holidays and living it up the last few years rather than putting a little aside for a rainy day ( because while the money still would have vanished, I’d have at least had some great memories, photographs and possibly hangovers to remember the holidays by).   

 When I feel down, though, I’ve never quite imagined it as Churchill’s proverbial black dog, trotting by my heels.  Partly because, as a teenager and a young adult, I did have a black dog, a kelpie-based mystery mix who was probably the most cheerful canine on the face of the planet.   When I feel down, it’s like a fluffy goosedown quilt on an icy winter morning – in some ways comforting, but also suffocating, and difficult to throw off.  

At the same time, feeling down at the moment has a touch of the self-indulgent about it – when I know that  in general I have it pretty good compared to so many others.  I have a great job that I enjoy, I have a roof over my head, and I have friends, family and I am fortunate in so very many ways.  Perhaps that’s part of it.  Perhaps the physical stability together with the inevitable passage of time has made me realise that the time has come to come to some decisions about life – and that I’m not even sure of my options.  For so long, I’ve had the option of procrastinating, of putting things off – until I finished my undergraduate degree, until I finished Articles, until I finished postgraduate study …. the list, and the morass continues – until eventually it has to stop.  I think I’m at that point now.

I can see the appeal of just wishing for some sort of deux ex machina – the proverbial Hand of God, or a prince to come riding on his white horse, a Lotto win, something quite out of the sky (out of the blue, natch!) to take one away from all one’s troubles….. well, I’d be lying to say it wasn’t tempting.   I think I can finally understand the appeal of strict religions – in some ways, the sheer certainty must be comforting.   

If I were to use the seasons as a metaphor though, this might be my winter.  A time to contemplate, to hibernate, to sleep.  Because spring might be just around the corner.

Ten Years Later

I went to my ten year high school reunion recently.  To a large extent, of course, facebook and social networking sites have reduced some of the surprise – though it was a much more enjoyable night that I’d thought it would be. 

Unlike the five year reunion, which was largely “I travelled for a year,” or “I’m about to finish X at University,” the ten year mark was a great deal more interesting.

There were some surprises, I have to admit – the social butterfly who is now an investment banker, the musician who is now a pilot – but by and large, everyone’s fates seemed to be largely consistent with the people that I knew.  There’s the other social butterfly and networker extraordinare who owns a PR company and has written a novel, the impecably presented gourmand who is a manager at a 5-star hotel, the computer guru who owns  a very successful IT/telecommunications company that provides highly useful solutions that I don’t understand - and then there are the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the scientists, the engineers - and even more confronting (for someone whose life is still a morass of directioness confusion), the ones who are happy parents, settled  and raising families in the suburbs, putting their children’s names down for the alma mater and seeing the cycle go around all over again.  

Milestones are always a bit worrying.  It’s times like these I wish I did write “time capsules” to myself, wondering what my future self would be like.  I wonder what my eighteen year old self would have thought of me now – would she be disappointed? proud? perplexed? I don’t know, really. 

I remember my eighteen year old self: arrogant and ambitious, all that adolescent angst and insecurity and that veneer of blithe confidence.   Have I changed? I hope so, though of course it’s hard to tell.

But one thing I did learn at the reunion – and the week beforehand, catching up with a few classmates who could not attend – is that I’m probably the one with the worst pespective of my life.  I might feel currently indecisive, directionless, underachieved and confused – but at the same time,  I’ve achieved most of the things I said that I wanted to do when I last saw most of my year-mates.  In a couple of instances, I’ve even exceeded what I set out to do.  

So maybe that’s the trick – to figure out where I want to be and just leap at it, and wait until the next school reunion to look back and wonder how on earth I did it!

Life can be a dream da-dum, da-dum

After last night’s $50 million lotto jackpot failed to go off, next week’s is set to be a record, of about $90 million.  I’m not sure of what the odds would be, other than miniscule, and I am sure that the only way that anyone makes money in lotto is through owning shares in Tabcorp, but for a moment or two, it’s nice to imagine what it would be like if a windfall just tumbled into one’s lap. 

I’ve decided that after the usual things – a nice house, a car, a holiday, helping out family and friends, setting up a charitable foundation, etc, I think I’d like to start a publishing house.

Your name is your destiny

Well, not quite – I’m sure most people have thought about the impact of their names on their outcomes in life – possibly the best known in the public pop-economics sphere in Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics, where the matter was analysed in an American context.

Recently, there was a brief flurry about the differing rates of reponse to job applications by applicants of differing ethnic backgrounds - the result of a study at the Australian National University, where researchers had sent out 4000 fictional applicantions to various advertised entry level positions.  In short, the study showed that applicants who had “ethnic” sounding names – in this case, those of Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle-Eastern background – had significantly lower levels of response than those applicants who had “Anglo” sounding names,*   when the applications were identical except for the name of the applicant.  Predictably, this set off the usual firestorm of debates about racism, immigration, employment, and society in general.  

 Being the nerd I am, I did download the full paper for a slightly more intellectual read on the tram home than the good old Mx.  Apart from my curiosity, and being of Chinese extraction myself, I rather guiltily turned to the appendix to see which were the “Chinese” names used in the experiment.  After my  usual huff that they hadn’t got the ratios of popularity of two-syllable to one-syllable names correct (two-syllable names are far more common, particularly in the Chinese diaspora population, but there was only one in the list of ten used. This is a slight issue I have with most English-language literature with Chinese supporting characters, including Kerry Greenwood’s otherwise excellent Phryne Fisher chick-lit detective novels, but that’s by the by),  quite aside from feeling rather sorry for the poor people at the other end of the process who had to flick through 4000 fake CVs,  and called back non-existent candidates, it did raise some very interesting questions, but perhaps not exactly the ones that I thought it would.

Naturally, the significantly different results obtained for CVs that were identical but for the name of the applicant, are alarming.  I would hazard to guess that most of the prospective employers who unwittingly took part in the experiment would be surprised to realise that they did.  I certainly don’t think there’s anything that can be done about the subconcious decisions people make in hiring, short of demanding that people leave their names off their applications (in which case, the snap decision as to whether to call a candidate can be on something else peripherally relevant), and probably says more about stereotypes than anything else, particularly the variance in the call-back rates depending on the nature of the different jobs.   It would be interesting to see if there were the same differences in a broader range of positions, though I imagine that with more skilled or senior positions, it would be much harder to sneak identical CVs through without someone getting suspicious! 

Then it did bring me to what was perhaps most pertinent to me – as most people who do work in Australia as realised, the vast majority of persons of Chinese extraction who live and work in Australia do have Anglicised names for general public use (and, most people, like me use their Chinese names as their middle names) – something I imagine a number of persons of non-English speaking backgrounds, with names that might be difficult to pronounce, do.   I wonder if there might have been a difference with the use of anglicised names – though, of course, the “ideal world” response is that it ought not, but there’s probably a large enough balance in both camps to be able to construct some interesting statistics out of it.

I was surprised though, at the automatic assumption in the press and in discussion that the  the adoption of names was simply for the benefit of the exclusively Anglophone.  Particularly in a multicultural society, the adoption of an anglicised name is, these days, I think more for the assistance of  benefit of non-English speakers rather than English speakers.   A case of English being the lingua franca, so to speak, for the very many disparate groups who now call Australia home.  

There’s a place for pride in one’s heritage, one’s background, one’s past, one’s principles. 

And there is a case of just being practical. 

A very interesting topic, nonetheless, and something I’m really going to have a good long think and percolate about – and maybe a longer post!

 *One notable exception was found in Melbourne, where an Italian sounding name resulted in far more interest from a prospective employer if you were seeking a position as a waiter or waitress

Blog in need of direction

Like the rest of my life, this blog is currently in a bit of a miasma, directionless, confused and generally feeling a bit pathetic and sorry for itself, without any real reason.  At first, I thought to write a little travel diary, of the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen.

Only I’ve not really been to all that many places, nor have I really seen that much (with people like Matt Harding setting the standard for light-hearted globe-wandering, I’m feeling practically provincial) .  And, on my last trip, much to my amusement, I couldn’t actually access wordpress once I got into mainland China – though my complete and utter inability to take pretty photos doesn’t really help on the travel writing scene.   Though I do have ambitions to make the big trip one day, preferably soon!  The recent cold snap has been enough to send me into numerous travel agencies the last few weeks, asking “What’s the longest budget trip you’ve got to somewhere warm?”

The photo bit is also a slight disadvantage with my second great love, food.   

So I’m afraid this blog will continue to drift for a while yet, and, like my life, float in a blur of blithering indecision

Career Crisis – the road not taken, and paths ahead

Warning: lots of self-absorbed whining and self-pity ahead

I was about 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.  Prior to that, I’d entertained thoughts of becoming an engineer.  Firstly, it tended to surprise people – secondly Dad was, by training, an engineer, and in those days I was very  much “Daddy’s Little Girl” and admittedly, I was more than a little proud that I was good at maths and science, as well as being able to write a decent paper (something I’ve found that most engineers can’t do).  I’m not sure when that changed – certainly, I can’t really put a finger on it, and I certainly put down engineering in my list of university course choices, but somehow, somewhere, I managed to stumble into the law.  And, currently, be wandering around on the periphery.

I was very, very fortunate to stumble into a great casual job when I got back from my most recent China trip – one where everyone was completely and utterly lovely, where I was learning a great deal, and getting skills that most lawyers don’t have, and being able to work on projects that made a real difference in the world, in a whole lot of really interesting ways.  Most of all, they were understanding, supportive and encouraging in my quest to find a lawyerly job.

However, as the weeks turned into months, it was becoming more and more apparent in my legal industry job search that the situation was much grimmer than I originally thought.  I suppose the little glimmer of optimism about being able to find something that wouldn’t result in either my stomach ulcer coming back or signing up for a nervous breakdown in six months’ time finally extinguished when my (very nice) recruiter warned me that the partner who would be my boss in a potential job was “difficult to get along with.”  Recruiters are practically the only optimists in the legal industry.  

My casual workplace has offered me a permanent job.   I’ve taken it, and though I’m very grateful to them, and grateful to have any sort of work at all in this current economic climate, much less something I enjoy, but there’s still that nagging feeling that this is very much a detour from where I am meant to be.

It’s always interesting to ponder the path not taken.  What if I had applied to study medicine, just to see whether I would get in?  If I had, would I have studied it?  And certainly an out-of-work doctor in this environment has slightly more noble options than an unemployed lawyer, such as volunteering for an NGO in some far flung corner in the world saving lives. 

But more realistically, and considering the skills I do have, what I’m generally wondering now is what might have been if I had just done a generalist degree in something I liked, but not one with any obvious employability skills.  Classics, say, or archeology.  Or philosophy. I’d have put off practicality for the 3 years – or 4, if I did an Honours year – and then gone and found a job in office administration, or as a PA, and maybe done TAFE courses at night. 

Would I have found a casual job at University that actually paid, knowing that my future earnings would be moderate at best, instead of volunteering at a Community Legal Centre “for the experience” and working only summers (and living off the largesse of my parents)?  Would finishing full-time study earlier, and heading into the workforce earlier have meant I had more working experience, always highly  valued  - certainly an skilled, experienced legal secretary or Executive Assistant earns considerably more than a humble junior lawyer!  The difference in the starting dates means that if I’d started as a legal secretary back then, I’d probably be counted as “experienced” by now.

But apart from the pay, which plateaus considerably earlier than the salaries of the really well paid lawyers (and corporates),  would I be more satisified now? 

Would I be happier, in a job where I would (generally) arrive at 9, and leave at 5, and when I leave the office, to leave it all behind me until the next work day, instead of compulsively checking emails at home, coming in on the weekend and worrying about work all the time (a habit which has carried over into my new job).  Not that secretaries, and assistants don’t worry about their work – but what I’ve always envied is the very sensible and practical realisation that if it is outside of office hours, and is dependent on another party, whatever needs to happen won’t happen until it is office hours again, and isn’t worth stressing over again until it is.  Something I do wish more lawyers would realise.  

Or would I instead be frustrated, knowing that I would always be invisible, that I would never have the chance to have the limelight, that I would rarely get any public acknowledgement of my work.  Would I be happy not to ever be “The Woman” but rather “The Woman The Woman (or Man) relies on”? 

But then, even so, would I care?  Would that be any different to being a junior or midranking lawyer who never makes it to the heights of being the ”Lead Partner” on the “Deal of the Year”, or one of the innumerable middle-management drones who never make it to the top, and yet are always the first go in any “company restructure”?

But  would I then spend my weekends and evenings doing the things I never seem to have time to do?  Would I finally schedule that CAE course that I’ve always been wary of enrolling in, for fear of not being able to make classes?  Would I actually dare to make dinner or drinks appointments for weekdays, confident that I would not have to  either have to rush out the office door or make shamefaced apologies to my companion at 5 minutes to 5?   Would I be getting up early to go to the gym, and not to the office to get some more work done?  Would my weekends then be more than simply catching up on the sleep I’ve missed during the week?

I seriously don’t know.  

But life, of course, isn’t about the roads not taken, but the one that was.  And though I’m wandering on a different path now, wondering if it’s a detour or a highway or just struggling my way through the bush, there really isn’t anywhere to go but forward.