Margaret, ESQ week one

Thanks everyone, for being so patient with my total lack of communication this week. After ten days without internet while we were traveling around Upper Egypt, I was already super behind on reading my messages when I started my new job. And, surprise, surprise, the law firm isn’t like the non-profit office where I can check Gmail and Facebook a million times during the day.

The week started early Sunday morning, which is the first day of the workweek in Egypt. It started too early, as it turned out, since I had foolishly never asked what time to show up for work and had to go in around 8:00 just to be sure no one was sitting around waiting for me. Which they weren’t. Nobody else got in until a little after nine, by which time I’d settled comfortably into the waiting room with my Jeffrey Deaver thriller.

Turns out my firm has almost has many IT guys as lawyers and way more than we have secretaries or assistants. We use so many Lexis Nexis programs in so many new and exciting ways (that most of us don’t understand) that they’ve actually asked us to do Beta testing on new software before but we turn them down because we can’t afford the catastrophe of software stopping working, even for a day.

Speaking of days, I have come to understand the concept differently this week. A day is no longer the amount of light outside or the 8 hours in between my punch in at 9 and my punch out at 5. A day is now as long as it needs to be for me to bill 7-8 hours of work on a client’s case (which is usually 9-10 hours). There is a little clock on my computer that I click on to start the seconds and minutes ticking away until I can go home. Whenever I want to go to the bathroom or get up for coffee (I’ll get to THAT in a minute) or chat with someone, I have to stop the clock, and restart it when I sit back down to work again. Also when I stop to ask questions, which I seem to need to do every forty-five seconds. Everyone in my office has been really nice and welcoming and they seem like laid-back, funny, intelligent people, but it is very stressful to try to get to know anyone when I have to stop my clock to have a conversation and can’t start counting down to the end of my “day” until the conversation is over. There is no such thing as small talk anymore.

Nescafe and tea are available in the office for free but we have to pay for coffee, which annoys me because I think coffee (and Nescafe is NOT coffee) is the fuel that keeps workers working efficiently and it is in the best interests of any company to keep its staff fully fueled, but I kind of understand it because drip coffee is much more expensive here. Milk, juice, fruit, yogurt and sodas are all kept stocked in the fridge and if we take one, or a coffee or espresso or glass of milk for our cereal, we color in the appropriate dot by our name on a sheet in the kitchen and the cost, from one to five pounds depending on the item, is deducted from our salary.

Lunch is also deducted from our salary. We can call anywhere we want to have food delivered to the office and the secretaries take care of the check and then deduct the total from our lunches from our salary at the end of the month. If I were more responsible, I could ask each day for my receipt so I know how much I spend on lunch each day but I think it is better not to know. Instead, I usually order from a delicious Egyptian place that is so cheap I usually have to order enough food for three meals just to make their 12 pound minimum charge (about $2.50). For that amount I can get a shish taouk sandwhich (chicken or steak grilled with peppers and onions on a stick and then unsticked into French bread), a thick, spicy lentil soup with crispy pita croutons, and a quarter of a grilled chicken over rice.

My office is colder than it is outside because we are on a shady side street across from a bank and a cheap tourist hotel (where we can see directly into the rooms…shout out to the guy in the towel with tattoos on his shoulder blades!) so we get natural light but no direct sun. This will be nice in the summer but I have to wear my coat all day now because the woman I share an office with, the wife of the principal partner of the firm, hates to have the heater on. Not that I could turn it on anyway. Pictured above is the remote control for the heater/air conditioner, which looks like it was designed by a six year old. There are THREE kinds of smiley faces and FIVE kinds of checkmarks on the buttons. Did I miss a class somewhere on the three types of smiley faces universally recognized to control hot and cold? On my second day, my officemate took pity on me in my coat and showed me how to work it.

I am part of the construction team in the firm, which, as I understand from carefully timed office chit chat makes most of the money for the firm, but is not the most interesting work. We also represent Egypt in arbitrations, which falls into the much more interesting and cutting edge realm of public international law. The new hires on that side of the office do research on public international law issues, which sounds awesome, whereas I look at correspondence a bunch of contractors sent to each other over the years it took to build a really big building. There are thirty or so issues I look for, like “Procurement” and “Payment” and when I find something relevant to our case, I mark it with one of the issue categories so it can be referenced later by a more senior attorney (that’s right, folks, I said ‘more senior ATTORNEY,’ I’m a freaking ATTORNEY now booyah…ahem…sorry…moving on).

There are nearly a hundred thousand correspondence documents in the case and the construction team needs to look at all of them so we’re expected to average 150-200 a day. I did about 900 this week and have thankfully moved on from the really technical correspondence about things I don’t understand like ductwork and grout and dampers to the really exciting memos about stuff like bonds and insurance policies and inter-trade coordination. What could be next?! I’ll keep you posted.