However, because the school had to submit to the inter-school sports authority the numbers of teams they would be fielding in each age division at the end of each school year for the next, they usually just had to guess at the numbers of students who were interested in a particular sport in any given year.  In my particular year, it seemed, there were more Year 7 and Year 8 girls – the junior division – who were interested in netball than expected, and rather fewer intermediate girls – years 9 and 10 than expected.  Therefore, as it emerged, there weren’t enough teams for the junior girls, and not enough intermediate girls to field one of the teams in the division up. 

Of course – rather than move the best junior team up a notch to see how they would do – the obvious solution, given that the alternative was to forfeit all the games that the non-existent team would have played, was to place my team there in the grade above.   Now, we were not the best team.  Rather the opposite, in fact.  The unco-ordinated, the unfit, the overweight, the disinterested, the recovering for serious illness and the inept.  I don’t think we lost a game by less than 25 goals, or scored more than 3 (and those largely flukes) the entire season. 

If real life had been a Disney movie, no doubt we’d have all bonded together in our ineptness, trained day and night, and then emerged, triumphant, at the end of the season to win the Grand Final.  But life isn’t, and since we had so little in common except our combined clumsiness and our resignation to doing compulsory sport, we lost, and lost, and lost all season, to the point where some of our opponents deliberately let our goals through our of sheer pity. 

So why have I been thinking about this over the last few weeks?  Certainly it’s not about netball, which I haven’t played since then (the following year, the school introduced something called “Ball Skills” for the chronically clumsy, which I’ve suspected was partly pity, partly embarrassment, and partly so they didn’t have to spend money on registration fees for sporting teams that were so completely hopeless), it’s about wondering whether I am indeed in completely in the wrong place for me. 

Certainly it feels that way a lot of the time, when concepts that seem perfectly clear and straightforward to people around me are unfathomable, and when I feel so completely and utterly out of depth.  There’s a part of me, the enthusiastic, dogged, idealistic part that knows I should be in there scraping my brains, day and night, until I finally triumph.   And there’s another part of me, who I’m trying to fight off, the clumsy, inept 13 year old, standing in the middle of the netball court, with the balls flying all around her, and just hoping that somehow, it will all just be over.

I guess it is part of the human condition, to always be dissatisfied with what one is doing now, and look back to what one did, or sideways to what someone else is doing, and thinking it so much better.  Even when I recall all the thoughts I had last year, wanting to get back into the law, and knowing that those were all true, doesn’t make the feeling that it’s not quite what I thought or remembered any different.  Thus is always human memory.  I don’t think any of us remember the past with any accuracy, lest of all the emotional things.  Maybe that’s the lesson I’ve learned.  That contentment and happiness is, ultimately, up to us to find.  However that may be.

It was a great success, in the end, I’m told – I didn’t get to go and see the final product, but everyone else seems happy.  So happy, in fact, that the Powers That Be want to make it an annual event. Certainly nobody mentioned any of the structural problems and the logistical problems that were the source of so much grief this time around as being worth attention for subsequent events.

It was then that I realised that in the world of event management, that after the event being a complete disaster, the next worst must be wanting to do it all again, on a more ambitious level, without acknowledging or dealing with the pitfalls from the first time.

All in all, it was a steep learning curve, a great experience that I’ll never get again.

Hopefully.

So, I’m off to catch up on sleep,  lose the weight I put on through long hours sitting at my desk and eating chocolate, and polish up my CV …..

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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!