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Thursday, August 03, 2006

On Examining

It's quarter to 9 on a Thursday. This will be the third night in a row that I've stayed at work past midnight. I was riding up the elevator reflecting on the 3-4 cases I still have to do before Monday morning. An idea bubbled up from my subconscious mind and was promoted to "thought" by my consciousness. The thought was, "This job really isn't that bad."

8:43 PM on Thursday, August 3, 2006: the moment that the job won.

Things could be a lot worse. Sure, the workload sucks. Sure, we get shit on by management, the media and attorneys. Sure, I am in some small way complicit in the horrors being perpetuated by my government at home and abroad. Sure, my function is to grant monopolies to impersonal, faceless, oppressive multinationals.

On the other hand, I get to spend all day telling lawyers that they're wrong. I work with cutting-edge technologies in a high-profile area of law (alright, cutting-edge technologies of two years ago). My hours are supremely flexible, my boss is cool and my co-workers almost universally smell better than I do, particularly when I go to the Old Town Cafe for lunch. I always get paid on time, and I can dick around online all day long if I want.

The sun has shined (shone? sheened? shinned?) every day for the last month. The earth has yet to be consumed by a Biblical, ecological or nuclear apocalypse. George Bush is a month closer to retirement. Bill and Melinda Gates are throwing money at all kinds of diseases that I could one day contract. On my own time, I'm free to undermine the intellectual property of the very corporations I aided during the day. There's a roof over my head, food on my table and a well-broken-in pair of Nike's on my feet.

Did I mention all the tail I bag?