Second Tuesday

Last Tuesday, I left the office at 4:45 pm.

Yesterday, I left at 8:45 pm.

But at least I got a car home.

The car service kicks in after 8:30. You apparently have to have billed a certain number of hours that day. I don't know if I reached that or not, but a tax attorney who was in the elevator with me said I should just take one, so I did. Summer associates can get away with anything, he said.

It was nice being taken home in one of the nondescript black sedans that ferry the Big and Important People around. And it was a lot faster than the subway.

What did I do to deserve this? I worked on 2 capital markets equity derivatives offerings, drafting final pricing supplements for both. They'll be checked over by the associates on each offering, and then checked over again and signed off by the partners. You know what that means in terms of actual work for hk. Monkeys.

Reading through a document carefully and editing it with pre-determined data is something that I enjoy and am good at. So I left with a sense of having done some work, albeit trained monkey work.

I know there's more to the work -- like, if I were to try to actually understand the stuff I read through, I'd be in the same position as the trained monkey: totally bewildered and possibly desiring a banana. (Maybe bananas foster. Mm.) But the stuff they entrust to summers is just as much as I can undertake.

My office mate, a very nice, geeky, tall, blond, corn-fed Nebraskan, left the office before me last night and said, "8:30 as a summer! I don't think I or any of my summer class ever stayed that late."

The thing is, I don't know how to slack off and not feel guilty about it. Which is what the Passive Aggressive Mighty Big Law Firm is counting on. And which is why law firms love Asian American women. We work hard and we're not threatening. (Usually.)