An Invisible Man's Blog

An Invisible Summer June 10, 2010

A note on my summer job.  I’m not going to be overly specific, just know that I’m interning at a government job, and I’m in the New York area.

Some thoughts on my first week of work (I guess it hasn’t been a full week, I still haven’t made it through Friday):

• A 9 to 5 sucks. This is my first time working a normal person schedule.  I used to work more than 40 hours a week, but it was on a bizarre schedule, which included 4 hours on Sunday, and had me working till 9pm some nights.  Working a fairly unchanging schedule everyday is painful.
• Documents. I don’t think I can describe the feeling of panic when an attorney dropped a whole case that had been on-going for seven years on my desk.  It was probably 500 pages of docs, and I had to get up to speed on it today.  It really wasn’t that bad, but when you first see it, it’s scary.
• A law degree doesn’t make you smart.  I spent most of today pouring over a judges request for information on certain issues.  Her requests for information were not clear at all, I spent 6 hours today frantically researching the topic and came up fairly empty handed.  I go and tell the attorney I was working with that I had bad news, and hadn’t gotten much headway.  He laughed, and told me ‘Jesus Christ, isn’t she an idiot? She thought Hawaii was an island in Mexico.’  Clearly they deal with this judge a lot.
• Wearing a Suit Sucks in the Summer. I work with a bunch of women who hate to have the A/C blasting, and most of the men in the office seem content to walk around all day with just their jackets off.  I overheat way too easily, so I have to roll down my sleezes, which no one else in the office seems to do.  Am I making a fashion faux pas?
• I need to get my clothes game correct. I thought I was prepared to work a job where I wear a suit everyday.  I have three suits, only two of which I wear.  It ends up both of them are extremely heavy wool suits.  I bought a new designer wool suit that was lighter in weight, but heavier on my wallet.  I also realized I really only had four serious dress shirts.  I had a white one, a white one with blue stripes, a blue one, and a cream one.  You need way more dress shirts than this.  It ends up my wardrobe was perfect for going on interviews, but not working an actual job.

That’s it for today.  Hope everyone else is enjoying their summer internships or their last moments of being a 0L before they irreparably ruin their lives with law school.