Thursday, February 21, 2008

More or less...

Evil brought it to my attention that it's been a while since I have posted. The reason for this? In addition to travelling to a tropical island paradise for a wedding, I have been buried in work lately. Every time I think I am almost caught up, something happens and I am once again trapped under a mountain of paper work, endless conference calls, and painfully long meetings. I had a 13 hour meeting at a client's office on Tuesday. THIRTEEN hours!! The junior associate representing the other side and I were in heated negotiations and completely lost track of time -- it was 10:30 pm when we realized that there was no one left in the office (the clients had left around 6:00, the senior partners around 7:00, leaving us behind to draft the damn documents) who could order dinner. Once I realized that it had been 10 hours since my last meal, I was suddenly ravenous and no longer able to concentrate on the piles of contracts in front of me. A person can only negotiate, draft and review documents for so long before losing it. Much of what we wrote at 10:45 made little sense the next morning. We ended up leaving my client's office at 11:00. It is 2 days since that meeting and I am still working out the kinks on these damn documents. But the end is in sight. I can start to catch up on all the work that I was supposed to be doing this week this weekend... Oh wait, I have a conference for work to go to all day on Saturday. Damn. Whatever happened to the weekend being a time to rest?

I just got off a 30 minute phone call for a different transaction. What is so surprising to me is that this 30 minute call was several orders of magnitude MORE painful than the 3 days of negotiating and drafting on an empty stomach that I described above. I am wishing that there was a formula for billing my time whereby the more painful an assignment, the more expensive it is (e.g., 30 minute call with incredibly condescending attorney = 10 days of drafting at client's offices). I am going to do a lot of "rounding up" when I input my time for that call.

2 comments:

Evil said...

you know what you should do? YOU should become one of those incredibly condescending attorneys. make life miserable for others! you ARE evil, after all.

and yes, this is my job. to bug evil twin #1 if she does not post every monday. and i bug evil twin #2 if she does not post every quarter (or so).

Anonymous said...

wow. a 13 hour heated meeting sounds hot. tell more.