Becky Turtle
Thursday, April 22, 2004
The corporate group had a wine tasting event tonight -- we do these group social events every couple of months or so and they're actually pretty fun. After about the fifth flight of wine people started getting rowdy and ordering in real drinks because it seemed like the flights were taking too long to come out. And from there it just devolved. We have a pretty good group here. I mean some wankers are to be expected but we have fewer real blowhards than you would think. Anyway I had a cosmo or two and when I was going to the ladies room I ended up standing in the foyer for a minute or two talking to the partner whose blog I've been reading. He was pretty well lit up too, and was being a little bit flirty with me, and I told him that I knew a secret about him and ran into the bathroom and laughed for a while in there. And he was waiting for me when I got out and made me tell him. I don't think he was expecting that his blog was the secret (wonder what he was thinking about?). He looked relieved at first and then looked a little worried and he made me promise him I wouldn't tell. This isn't telling, is it? I won't tell anyone in the office. I didn't tell him I had one, so he doesn't know about this one yet as far as I know.
My feet are killing me because I was wearing pretty high heels yesterday and of course a couple of us left the restaurant and went to a bar where we danced for a while. I think a bunch of them are still out right now but there's no way I could drag myself in tomorrow if I had stayed any longer. Flats tomorrow for sure.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Busy busy busy!
Also think I'm catching a cold. This is a terrible time of year to get a cold.
Ethan says he's going to come over this weekend and teach me how to put in a hit counter. I have no idea if anyone is reading this thing. He said that last weekend though and our schedules didn't work.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Whoah. It's wierd to be able to read the blog of someone you work with. The partner here who has a blog is going through a midlife crisis or something. He's afraid he's lost his soul.
And he describes people in the firm he thinks have souls, and doesn't include me. Which I don't really like. Just because I don't talk about what I do outside of work at the office doesn't mean I don't have interests -- I still run, and I go dancing sometimes, and see my family when I can. And when these loans are paid off I'll be able to work for a bank or something and have a little more of a life.
He did have links to some pretty cool blogs -- the Uncivil Litigator one I'd already linked to but also this guy is really funny and this chick seems cool, although maybe a bit of a flake. And the associate who emailed me and tipped me off about the partner has a blog too, which is here. She sounds like fun from what she writes about. I don't know how she finds time to do all that stuff. I guess the partner here would think she has a soul.
There's nothing better than being really busy. I've got two deals that I'm pushing through for an end of the month closing. One's a pretty standard private equity round of financing, and we represent the investor so the deadline doesn't matter to us as much as to the company, though we certainly don't want to be the reason it doesn't close. The other is this really complex agribusiness asset purchase; our client is buying some producers and some processing and canning plants. Some of the assets are here and some in Mexico, so I'm getting to use my Spanish a little. Who would have thought agribusiness would be so cool, but it's really interesting. There are so many pieces in this deal -- so many licenses and permits that need to be transferred, here and in Mexico; all the employment and immigration issues and the federal agricultural statutes as well as the regular diligence and terms that go along with any corporate asset purchase. And I kind of look at my food a little differently when I'm in the grocery store, knowing now about the irrigation equipment leases and the rolling stock of the trucks that move the product down to the canning plants and the entire payroll for the plants. Anyway, I'm pushing through all this stuff with hardly any time for anything else and it's a total rush. There's a bit of a flutter in my stomach which the litigators tell me they have when they go into court. For me it's about what am I forgetting, and what needs to happen first, what's mine and what can be pushed down to a third year, what needs the partner, and how do I keep all these balls in the air that's such a rush. A scary rush but still full of adrenaline.
The partner who had the stroke is at home now, learning to walk again. There was some damage to his left side. I'm thinking I'll visit tomorrow if I can steal a little break in the action.
Monday, April 19, 2004
I've got clients in this morning and then I'm out of the office for a closing this afternoon, but there's a minor train wreck happening with the assistants. We were down three or four legal secretaries to begin with, which is a lot, and last week we lost a couple in the tax department. So now there's all this scuffling going on about moving people around and Helen's in the middle of it which makes me in the middle of it too. There's no way they're taking Helen away from me. And she wants to stay with me. But there's all this office politics drama going on and Helen's asking me to step up and put in a word for another assistant who works on our floor and who's tight with Helen, and help swing it so she doesn't get moved. This is not where I want to waste whatever small amount of influence and seniority I have around here. Which is not much. But I don't want to tick off Helen either. It's delicate. I'm not doing a very good job dealing with it.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Okay, so it is upside down week at the office. I just got an email from someone I don't know who told me that there's a partner here who has a blog. I'm not linking to it here because Ethan told me people can tell if you link to them. Which obviously I don't want. But it's very, very wierd to read. I mean, he doesn't have his name on his blog but I totally know who it is, and it's like reading someone's diary or something. It is not his office persona at all. The whole thing kind of creeps me out. In one way it's interesting, you know, to read someone's thoughts when they don't think you know it's them. And I'll definitely look at him in a different light. On the other hand I feel sort of strange about it. It's not necessarily a better light I'm seeing him in. It's like when you walk in on someone and they're picking their nose or something.
And to tell you the truth it was wierd and kind of cool and a little bit creepy to get email from someone I've never met before. I didn't really imagine that anyone would read this. I'm not sure what I think about it now. I don't know how she found out about me.
The partner who keeled over is in stable condition, still at the hospital but now he's talking and they say it looks like he's going to recover, if not full motion, at least a bunch of his functions. I don't know how I'm going to sit at my desk and not keep having flashes of looking over at him and watching him fall over. Tomorrow I've mostly got meetings and so won't have to be in there too much. I might just take my laptop into one of the conference rooms for most of the week, just to kind of get my groove back.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Yesterday was the wierdest day of my legal career. I've been working on a presentation and a paper with a senior partner and he was in my office, leaning over my desk working with me on the paper. I asked him a question about one of the edits he made and when I looked up at him his face looked, well, wierd. He wasn't himself in kind of a spooky way. But sad spooky, not Dracula spooky. I don't know how to describe it. And just as it was registering to me, "he looks kind of wierd, I wonder what's up" a half a second later he lurched to the side and fell down. He hit his head either on my lamp or on the corner of the desk and got a cut that started to bleed, and he knocked over my wastebasket with his arm and so there were papers and a banana peel and soda cans there on the floor with him. He wasn't passed out, his eyes were open but he wasn't talking either.
I freaked out, put a napkin over the cut on his head and called Helen, my secretary, in. I had no idea what to do. When I was in high school I had a first aid certificate but I don't know how I earned it because I just felt panicky and desperate and had no idea if you elevate or try to give mouth to mouth or what apply pressure or what you do when someone falls down on your desk. Helen was very cool and calm. She called security and started taking his pulse and telling me what to do (unbutton his collar and sleeves, take off his shoes, get some water and a cold paper towel for his forehead). I don't know if those are medical things or not but I did them and was glad to and the knot of anxiety and disbelief never really left my stomach. The office was pretty soon full of people, me and Helen and a couple of the corporate partners and eventually some ambulance guys who asked me a bunch of questions about how he looked and what he said and how he fell and took him away.
When he was gone I closed my door and tried to clean up my office and then just sat at my desk shivering. I have no idea what happened to him. One minute we were talking about the order of the sections in this paper and the next he's on the floor bleeding and kind of cold and yellowish-blue and clammy, breathing and moving his eyes a little bit but not saying anything. He's not that old, maybe early sixties. He smokes like a chimney but never seemed particularly unhealthy to me. One of the partners and Helen and I were talking about it and Helen said she was pretty sure it was a stroke, and one of the medics had said that too. I don't know anything about strokes. I've been reading about them a little on the internet.
The partner's wife called in a little later, from the hospital, and she wanted to ask me the same questions the medical guys had asked about just how he looked the minute before he fell and how he was acting while we were talking. I felt like a disappointment because I hadn't noticed anything odd until I looked up at his face, which maybe did look wierd because the left side was droopier than the right, but maybe I'm just imagining that because of what I've read about strokes. Anyway, I didn't have much to tell her but I asked if I could go to the hospital and she said only family were allowed there. I wished I could give her a hug.
I couldn't work so I left and went for a long run and thought about keeling over one day at work and whether I would feel proud of my life so far. Which I'm still thinking about today, back in my office, trying to catch up on the things I didn't finish yesterday.
Friday, April 16, 2004
My sister and brothers and I are trying to set up a big party for my mom this Mother's Day. My older sister and brother are being kind of jerks about it. I guess they don't mean to, but they don't have the kind of jobs that I've got. My younger brother works for Bank of America, and he's logging more hours than me at the office. But the other two are constantly sending emails and drafts of invitations and ideas about, like, the color of the plates and who should bring what, and they get mad at us for not responding. Just tell me when and where to come. It's not that I don't love Mom. I just have a demanding job. I don't think they get what it's like to have so little energy left over. Especially in my first couple of years I would have to cancel or I would show up late to family stuff. Or I would miss calls. They thought I didn't care about the family. It's not true. It's just hard.
Plus at the Mother's Day brunch it's going to be even more depressing. I get very few days, full days, where I don't go into the office. It's precious time for me. But I know what I'm going to get. Guilt trips from older brother and sister, and my sister in law, for not pulling my weight in party planning and making devilled eggs or whatever. Plus it's always fun to see my nieces and nephews but Mom will look over one of their heads at me, raise her eyebrows, and say, "So, Becky, have you decided when you're going to give me some grandchildren?" And my sister will say something mean like, "Forget it, Mom. She doesn't care about that -- all she cares about is climbing the corporate ladder." Pretending like she's getting me off the hook.
I always thought I would have kids. I still want them. Once upon a time I had a choice to make, and I chose to be a lawyer instead of choosing to be a mom. Which was good, I was too young and way too screwed up and I have no regrets about my decision. I never would have thought I'd be here at thirty-three starting to wonder if I'll ever get to make the decision again. Maybe I should freeze some eggs or something. Most of the female associates I've been here have dropped off the partner track and gotten pregnant. A couple have come back but most just gave up law. I don't know. I cry about it sometimes. It seems like it would be impossible to do both. I don't want to end up like the tax partner screaming at her family with the door closed.
Anyway now I need to respond to all these emails from my sister-in-law.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
The partner I work with is breathing fire today. I guess he came in and made a phone call to one of our clients and asked for the old CFO, not the new CFO, because the contact database wasn't updated when the old CFO was fired. He was embarrassed (and he should have been, because we had to buy the old CFO out of his contract, and it was an involved and protracted negotiation that both he and I were part of, and I can't understand how he forgot in the first place). Anyway, he's asked me to go through all of our clients and make sure the firm database is accurate with the personnel of the company and their correct address, etc.
It's a huge pain in the ass. I've pushed some of it down on a third-year, but a lot of it is just me looking at the files and dictating to my paralegal, "ok, let's see, BigCo just opened a Colorado office, make sure we have that information, you can get it in the annual report, and I think they laid off a bunch of their management, so pull me all the contact cards and let me look at them." I mean, I keep so much of this in my head that I can't just delegate it. Plus it's sort of a rainmaking function -- I call whoever my best contact in the company is and say "hello, hey, Alex, can I just make sure we have everything right, and is the chairman of the board still Pete, yeah, I thought so, and is there anyone new or anyone gone," well, half the time Alex has a question he was meaning to call us about.
But it's a huge hassle (well, except I can IM my friends while I'm doing it, which is kind of fun, since it only takes about half a brain). It means a million voicemail messages and not much uninterrupted time to get real work done. And I know I'm going to lose hours. I mean, it's billable, I guess, especially in the cases where there turn out to be real changes or where they have legal questions or something to tell me. But a lot of it's not, and even the stuff that is -- I have to open a million different matters and bill each one with .1 or .2 and it's just a real pain.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
I sometimes feel sorry for the partners. It's because the savvier clients, even though they like the partners, will go to one of the associates with five or six years of experience to do a lot of the work. One, it's because they can often get us on the phone quicker, and two, it's because they know they're getting something nearly as good for a lot less money. I mean, a partner might write a better letter than me on behalf of the client, but it's not going to be THAT much better, and it might not be better at all. And I don't care whether you've been practicing law twenty five years, writing a decent letter is going to take a partner about the amount of time it's going to take an upper level associate. But it's going to cost the client $200 or $300 more for your letter than for mine. Wierdly enough, the further along you go in the profession, sometimes the less you are able to give your clients a really valuable service.
I forgot that I drunk-dialed Ethan last night and must have told him that I was having fun with this blog. He emailed me this morning and told me I need to link to other lawyer blogs. He sent me a bunch of sites that he found that I thought he would like. I haven't read them all yet but most of them are boring. This one's pretty cool -- it's a young litigator and he tells it like it is. I like what he says about not being afraid to look stupid. That's not just true with the lawyers you're working with. You have to be able to tell the client you don't know the answer to a question they have. Even harder than that is asking the client for clarification of something the client assumes you know. But you'd better speak up, interrupt and say, "Wait a minute, I'm a step behind you here, could you tell me why we're talking about the Series B investors in connection with this?" It feels horrible the first few times you have to do that. But it's a lot better to have done that than to be reporting on the call to the partner in charge of the deal and have him look at you and ask the question that you should have asked and you admit you don't know. Invariably the question you get is, "Why didn't you ask?" That's when you feel stupid.
For general corporate law stuff this blog is good too. Ethan got all excited about this one as well, but Ethan's more of a geek than I am.
Ethan says he's going to come by this weekend and install a hit counter for me. Cool. It's wierd to think about people actually reading this though.
So a couple of us from Corporate, and a bunch of guys from Tax and two or three from Environmental went out last night with an eye toward getting the kid from tax drunk enough that he would try to hack into the email system and send some juicy emails. We didn't succeed. Instead we cooked up all the stormiest gossip we might send around the office. I was crying, I was laughing so hard.
But you know, today, sober, I'm remembering some of the stuff that got said. There are very few secrets at law firms, although some stories take a long time to come out. Last night I learned that a tax partner I've always liked and looked up to, who was great to me when I was a first year associate and who still takes pains to have lunch with me a couple of times a year, closes her door and screams -- literally screams -- at her kids on the phone daily. That just creeps me out. Lady, go home to your family. Something is seriously wrong. It's harder to look up to her, even though she's always been a role model and a mentor to me.
And of course we got into all the divorces going on with the more interesting partners. And from what I could tell it looks like there's a romance starting between a couple of the third-years who were out last night, both of whom are married. I do admire the lawyers who can do this kind of work successfully and stay married to the people they were married to when they started. But even among those supposedly happy couples, well. All I know is I've been groped in the back of cabs on the way home from closing dinners where everyone had too many scotch and sodas. When I was a fourth year I had a little thing with a junior partner in litigation, who was "separated" from his wife but has since gotten back together with her. I don't think anyone at the firm knows about that but listening to the talk last night I got nervous. I have some secrets I'd prefer to believe will be kept.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Truth is stranger than fiction. I was wrong about the tax associate -- he was just joking around, as it turns out. The h.r. people actually sent a memo out threatening us that they're counting pens and paperclips and sticky notes. Are you kidding me? It's already a huge hassle to send a fax or make a photocopy. You have to enter codes identifying you and the client and the matter and if you screw up even one number you have to fill out an end of the month summary report and if you do that too often you have to attend a "procedures" session. Like this is the best use of the people billing out over $290/hour. Their "efficiency committee" should make sure the Internet works around here all the time. When I thought the tax guy had done this it was funny because it was so absurd. Now I'm just depressed.
Maybe I'll see if I can bribe the tax kid to hack in and send out a memo saying the office supply memo was a joke and should be disregarded. I mean, we're all going to disregard it anyway, except the first and second years and the paralegals and the assistants.
The kind of babysitting that goes on in this place is just amazing.
In the corporate department the partners and the associates who work on deals frequently gripe about the i-bankers, and how much money they make compared to us and how much harder we work. I don't know if they're that bad. The ones I know work pretty hard. Although they do make even more absurd amounts of money than we do. My younger brother is a first year investment banker, and his life now is even worse than my first couple of years here.
One of the 2nd year associates in Tax who used to be an IT guy logged into one of the administration people's email account and sent out this bogus email about office supplies today. Hilarious. It totally sounded like the crazy policies they put forward. There's usually some kind of really mind-numbingly stupid memo circulated around this time of year as they prepare for the summer associates to come -- dress code "clarifications" or mail delivery schedules or refrigerator leftover clean-out policies. What's even funnier about this one is how few people realize the thing that went out this morning was a joke. The tax associates are really funny, which you wouldn't think but there it is. Anyway, it's going to be a little tempest in a teapot and I expect there will be some kind of firm wide investigation into the "hacking" when the H.R. person convinces the partners that it wasn't her (if any of the partners even question the memo -- if they even READ the memo) but I'll put my money on the associate in tax over the "technology committee" of partners if it comes to that.
Monday, April 12, 2004
I had a pretty good Easter. One of my sisters lives in San Diego and so I spent the day with her and her husband and their two little boys. Playing with them is really fun, and makes me want kids.
I came into the office for a couple of hours last night but didn't get much done. One thing that amazes me about our firm is that the Internet doesn't always work. Like, maybe twice a month goes down for a couple of hours. How does that happen? We have a whole tech support team and reasonably good equipment and this very fancy office and then suddenly you can't send or receive emails from clients. It makes me crazy. Sometimes it's kind of nice because it eliminates the worry that something's just come in by email that's going to change the whole day's priorities. Anyway last night I couldn't get Internet from the office so I revised a couple of agreements and then went home.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
The only thing worse than having too much work is having not enough work. A friend of mine in the environmental compliance group is sweating a little bit. When there's not enough work the partners keep what there is for themselves and the associates start sweating. You can only drag out research projects for so long. Everyone thinks this work is nonstop all kinds of hours and that's usually true. So you'd think when our workload eases up it would feel good and we'd just go take some time off or start hitting the gym again and be happy about it. But we're not normal people. We're lawyers. You worry, because you know your billables are low, and you can't do work if you don't have any, but you don't want to leave the office in case work comes in and you're not there to get it and someone else gets it instead. And you know those low billables are going to look bad at the end of the month, and you start to sweat and you wonder if your practice group is getting a bad reputation or if your rainmakers aren't that good, and if your bonus is going to suck and the managing partner is going to cut back the department. We had a couple of months of slow time my fourth year and it was scary. We all thought we were going to be fired. People think it sucks when it's busy. Well, it does. But it sucks, it really sucks, when it's slow. My friend in environmental is talking to other firms.
Friday, April 09, 2004
People in LA have too much money. I have a client who's the wife of one of the CEOs we do a ton of work for. The CEO is also best buddies with one of the partners here. Anyway, this woman has a little hobby that she thinks is a business and she "wants nothing but the best" for her little business so she's forever calling me and asking me to read, like, the photocopier service agreement and the lease agreement for her little retail store and the fine print on the invoices she ordered. Then when she gets me on the phone she wants to talk forever, about the color of the new product she's going to do, or the new idea she had. Always she's telling me how "dog-tired" she is or how she's been "working non-stop" on this business of hers. From what I can tell that means chatting up the ladies she does Pilates with and calling me. She keeps me on the phone for huge amounts of time and has these crazy "what if" scenarios. The business, by the way, is preposterous. It's a high-end personalized pet product store and mail order business. She's got like six terriers. Maybe only four but she's nuts over these dogs and has personalized silver dog bowls for each one and all kinds of stuff. I mean, it's not really a business at all -- it's this woman's fantasy about what a business might be, if she really knew anything about running a business at all. So every time she calls me she's saying something like, "I'm thinking about taking the business in a new direction," and telling me about some "Internet community idea" or about the important meetings she's going to have next week that are going to be shocking and exciting.
I don't have time for this. I have to be nice to her, and encouraging to her, because, well, her husband is Mr. Big, not to mention she's over to dinner or playing golf all the time with one of the important partners in this practice group. And she LOVES me. She's all the time calling to "update me on the business" and complain about how exhausting this schedule is for her and how her creative energies are being drained by, well, doing anything practical at all. And when she's not calling me she's sending me inspirational e-cards and things. Which I have to respond to. But, you know, I'm drafting prospectuses and handling mergers and this woman wants to talk to me for forty minutes on whether she should get the new product line manufactured in the United States or overseas and thinks there are important international law issues to discuss. I can only put her through to voicemail so many times before she starts getting bitchy but it is hard always to be nice. She pays her bills, though. And trust me, I bill her for every minute of every call.
I love mornings here. Nobody on my floor but me is in here this early (and a couple of the IP guys but they're pretty odd anyway) and it's quiet and sunny and I can crank right through the morning's work and feel like I have my act together by the time my assistant and the other associates get in. This place doesn't really start going until 9:30; some partners don't come in until 10 or later. I've always been a morning person and I think that has helped me out in my career because most of the deals we're involved with, maybe three-quarters, have some party who's on the east coast or who uses an east coast lawyer. So they start calling here at the crack of dawn and sending emails that they expect a response to on New York time. The partners I work with like it that I'm here and up and so they can kind of relax about that stuff so when they show up to the office and find fourteen emails and voicemails about some problem with the latest version of the P&S they find a fifteenth email from me taking care of it, or at least telling the East Coasters when they can expect a response.
Anyway I think word got out among the partners that if you were working on a deal with me you could drive your kids in to school or get a morning workout in or have an after-breakfast quickie with your wife and things would still be under control when you got in, you wouldn't need to be on your Blackberry the whole time. So I think I got pulled into some deals because of that and it's turned out pretty good for me -- I was working on stuff that six-years weren't getting when I was three, four years out. I didn't realize when I was starting out how much political positioning shit goes on at these firms, who gets the good work and how you stay friendly with the other associates even while you're sort of hoping you, not they, get on the hot deals. I mean we're friendly too but it's more competitive than they tell you starting out.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The blogs I read are Tequila Mockingbird, who is a friend of a friend. I used to read one called Patent Pending by a lawyer which I thought was pretty funny but I guess he stopped. And I sometimes read Pound. Also my friend Ethan's blog which is a secret. I guess I shouldn't use names on this. Beckyturtle is a nickname, obviously. In grade school it was my nickname because in my kindergarten class there was a girl who had the same first name as me so somehow the teacher decided it would be clearer if they just used my middle name instead of having two girls with the same first name. And somehow we all just went along with it. Anyway, so I was Beckyturtle for first through fifth grade. The turtle part came because in kindergarten my family gave the class a turtle that had been my brother's and so it became the class pet. My grade school friends called me that. I guess if you know me from grade school you know who this is. But I moved away in fifth grade and when I got to my new school I went back to using my real first name so I don't think anyone is going to find me because of this blog. Which is good because I want to be able to be totally honest here.
So today was another terrible day. I got totally gored by a client. Which I knew would happen. These guys are generally pretty cool, and the CFO and I have a pretty jokey relationship but the CEO can be a real prick to deal with and he only wants to talk to the partners so even though the senior partner doesn't have a CLUE what's going on and if the client knew the idiotic questions this partner asks me during the conference calls he'd think twice about the $475/hour rate. One of these days the partner is going to think he's pressing the mute button on the speakerphone and his finger's going to slip and the client will get an earful.
(My buddy who's an investment banker says you can completely tell when someone on a conference call has hit the mute button and is talking shit about you during a call. There's something about the silence that's just too quiet. I think it depends on the kind of phones you use. Sometimes I think I can hear it -- a little variation in the static background noise -- but I'm not sure. Guess I'm just not on enough conference calls. Seems like I'm on them all the damn time.)
So this partner, besides having this thing for the mute button on the speakerphone, spends these calls either asking me questions I already gave him the answers to, or saying something to the client that's just wrong, and I need to make faces at him and correct, or he's not paying any attention at all and surfing the ESPN site or shopping for golf clubs while he's listening with about 1/10th of a brain. Anyway. It makes me crazy sometimes. I'm not there yet and so I got reamed, and the partner stood by (although he sort of placated the client in the end). I did make a pretty big mistake, with a UCC filing slip up. We've got enough leverage with the debtor that I don't think it will turn out to be a huge deal but, you know, it's something like $75K which is enough to piss off the client. (They got the numbers mixed up in the call and were thinking it was closer to $60K, which I didn't chime in to correct.)
So the scary part of the day was I was just totally panicked about how many OTHER securities filings for other clients might have lapsed. Crappity crap crap. I'm going to work on it some tonight and then I think I'll see if my paralegal can do some more checking up to cover my ass tomorrow.
I don't really know how to do this but my buddy Ethan has one of these that's hilarious, only no one knows it's his so I guess I can't tell you about it. But I read it a lot and there are a couple of others I read that if I knew how to link to them I would.
Anyway Ethan says it's really great to get all the shit he wants to complain about out and I can tell you I need a place to do that. I mean my friends don't want to hear it and I can't really talk about work except to a couple of people who really get it, and some days I just want to throw myself off a ledge. So I'm going to try it out for a while.
