So, this job.
I've been working here a little over a month now. It's a very small solicitor's office, only two lawyers, the founder and a junior. There's also an apprentice (who, of the three of them, works the hardest by far), three legal secretaries, a clerk, a part-time accountant, a receptionist, and me. Ten people.
I'm supposed to be a legal secretary but my duties have been more along the lines of clerk stuff, mainly I think because they don't have a dictaphone unit for me, which is how most of the legal work gets done 'round these parts. Well, it's partially the fact that there's no dictaphone for me and partially the fact that there's no computer for me.
And no desk. Did I mention no desk?
Yeah.
(Also, I dont have an email account or a log-in name. I'm using one of the former secretary's. To be fair, sometimes I can use the part-time accountant's desk in the afternoon.)
You think I'm trying to say I'm not wanted. But that's not the case. Despite the fact that she offered me the job three weeks ago, yet I'm still being paid through the temp agency. I'm wanted. It's just that the head solicitor, though obviously an intelligent woman, is the most disorganized, scatterbrained person I've ever worked under, to the point of frank incompetance.
Things have been getting a little worrying the past couple days. The apprentice --- the one who does most of the work around here --- goes back to school in a few week's time. And we'll be down to nine.
And one of the other legal secretaries is home sick indefinitely with a viral infection. Eight.
The office clerk handed in her week's notice Tuesday. Seven.
And the receptionist stormed out of here in a huff this morning. Six.
I think I'm gonna try my damndest to make it five. Fortunately, I had an interview today that went pretty well.
Wish me luck. Whatever happens, I'm gonna need it.
You often hear it said of Arizona: “It’s hot, but it’s a dry heat.” In Ireland, it’s cold but it’s a wet cold. The sky may be clear and the sun may be out --- momentarily --- but when the wind blows it has the promise of water in it, like a freshwater version of a sea breeze.
The past few days the weather has been petulant. A woman at work assured me that in Ireland spring started the beginning of this month [1], but the past few days the weather gods have decided to remind us that it is decidedly still February. I woke this morning to find a light dusting on the daffodils in the front yard. (At least, I’ve been told they’re daffodils. A clump of them sprang up where a rose bush used to be, little yellow things with ruched edges, looked a bit like a teacup and saucer stuck sideways on top of a thick green stalk.) This is the first time the snow has stuck at all; it’s very damp stuff, which does not so much float gently from the heavens in big fluffy flakes as get spat at the earth like so many billions of tiny white Nerf balls.
I don’t expect it to last long, though; the temperature has danced merrily back and forth over the frost line over the past few days, so sometimes you get a burst of snow, other times hail or a cold, penetrating rain. Still, for all this nastiness of the weather the past few days it’s only been intermittently nasty, displaying the easily distracted whimsicality of all weather here. I think if Ireland had a weather god it might take the form of a kitten, all hissing wind and spitting hail one minute and gambolling happily after a dangled sun ray the next.
[1] Did you know that every country just randomly picks a day when spring starts? I always thought it all had to do with solstices and equinoxes and whatnot but according to this it’s just what everybody frickin’ feels like. I can see where it kind of makes sense for Ireland’s spring to start in February, however; though the weather is being uncooperative the light definitely started to change this month. Beginning in November and all through January it was dark coming and going to work; over the past few weeks the days have lengthened so now it’s light as I’m leaving and most of the way coming home.