Rhodes Law Confidential: The Working Shower
Let me tell you a secret: I shower at night. I know lots of people do it in the morning, but I am a night showerer. I like to be clean when I get into the bed. Hot showers in the morning make me feel a little queasy. They always have.
Why am I telling you about showers in a post that is supposed to be about the secret lives of lawyers? Because, I do some of my best legal work in the shower. With some jobs, you go home at five o’clock and get to “leave work at work.” As a lawyer, the work is with you all the time. There is an ever-present mental connection to the clients and to the work that must be done.
1. Law School Taught Us to Be Crazy Workaholics
Law school drills students daily for three years from the workaholic’s bible:
- Your work is never done
- Your work never good enough
A lawyer can never read enough, write enough, think enough, return phone calls enough, prepare enough.
2. Vacation is just thinking in a more attractive place.
After my last law school exam, I had this really brief period when, for the first time in three years, I had no work to do. No work. Classes were over, and I didn’t begin bar exam prep for a couple of weeks. It was such a strange feeling, and I remember talking about how that felt with my classmates. We all walked around like zombies with no idea what to do without this constant pressure to work.
That period was in May 2005. So, since May of 2005 I have never again experienced the feeling of actually having nothing to do. Even on vacation, I still have this pervasive pressure of work that needs doing. At all times, I have a client who needs my attention; I have a legal problem that I just need to think about a little bit longer; I have an opposing counsel that I can’t stop talking to in my head.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
3. We work in the shower.
I talk to myself in the shower. Actually, I talk to lots of people in my head in the shower. At least twice a week, I get so engrossed in my imagined conversation that I don’t notice whether I’ve shampooed my hair.
Then, I have to stop what I’m thinking about in the shower and look around and see if I can find any clues to tell me whether I’ve washed my hair. I never know. And then, I get to enjoy a particularly female brand of anxiety of worrying about the damage to my hair if I shampoo twice. Then, I resume my conversation with myself about my work.
What would I want my clients to know about me? I work hard for you, even when I’m in the shower.