Occasional cases

You probably think I'm insane to be so pissed off. Anal, too. I think I'm insane to be so pissed off, too.

While collaborating in a short report (god! It's just a short report, why is it so hard to explain things?!) over the weekend, I told my teammates that the document on googledocs had margins that were too narrow and looked strange. This was my diplomatic way of saying that side margins of 1.0cm (0.4inch) were not acceptable and could they change that to a 1-inch margin, please?

(On hindsight I've credited my teammates with too much ability to empathise with my quirks.)

I soon got an email from my teammate that said "Oh I used narrow margins haha, will fix" or the like, and not wanting to kick up a fuss AND assuming they got my point, I thought they would change it before sending to the prof.

Today I finally looked at the pdf they sent the prof (my bad, I should have asked for clarification there and then). 1-cm ETA: actually 1.27cm side margins. I hate it like burning. Die in a fire burning. It looks cheap and unprofessional. It'd be one thing if we were just sending class notes to one another. But since it supposed to be in report format, it behooves one to use a official-looking report format, no?

Hate it so much, enraged, and mortified that the prof received something from our group that looks... like we were skimping on paper by cramming everything together. Like we didn't know how to format a document properly. (The font was also a bit small, but that's not so bad.) To clarify, there was no page limit, so this wasn't even a half-assed way of squeezing content into required number of pages because we weren't intelligent enough to summarise the information further.

You don't have to say I'm making a big deal out of nothing. Much. I know it. But still not best pleased. I don't want to nag people about something so minor but it bothers me a lot.

An encounter that's going to take some background explaining, but I wanted to get it off my chest.

So today my boss at intern!place said, "Right, the other side mentioned Pitt v Holt, we need to deal with that. [Intern], write a note on it."

I said, "Erm, I don't know if the Supreme Court decision is out yet... but I will check."

[It was. It is. It came out in May 2013. Press summary.]

A while later our super efficient Legal Executive helpfully gave me a printout. Assuming that it was indeed the SupCt decision, I thanked him and thought, "Damn, I should have printed that instead of reading it on my screen."

Then I read the top few lines. Court of Appeal decision, 2011? I approached LE and said (ok, I probably sounded too hesitant. And possibly garbled), "This is the Court of Appeal decision. Should I print the newest Supreme Court decision instead?"

Answer: "The CtAp decision is the newest decision."

Me: "But this is in 2011. There's a SupCt decision. It's, erm, by a higher court...?"

Answer: "The CtAp decision is the higher court decision."

*am mansplained to about courts in England* (Honestly, for a moment I really thought the CtAp was the highest court in the land... before I came to my senses.)

Me: "Yes, but if there's a SupCt decision - look, 7 SupCt judges to your CtAp 3! - and it's the most recent, shouldn't we use that instead?"

Answer: "Oh, I don't know where you get that, is it from your school database? We don't have that here."

Me: *why do you sound resentful of me for having access to the school database?* "No, actually I googled it, plus I noticed it's up on Bailii which is free. We should print that, right?"

Answer: "Print it, then."

I'm just... I dunno. Our LE is a qualified lawyer, everyone tells me very good at what he does, very efficient and smart. He's also very serious all the time. I do feel like he thinks I'm really slow, or something. Maybe I am? I do ask a lot of questions, and if that makes me sound stupid, well. Can't be helped.

I thought it was nice when my office had these huge windows, but now looking out, I just feel like we're being besieged, as the outside gets progressively hazier, like so. I suppose we could roll down the blinds but I'm morbidly curious now. We're now way past the 'hazardous' level of PSI 300 - it's at 400 now.

Reports say that Sumatra and Johor are just as badly affected, if not more so. Oil palms: you think they sound green, but not quite so.

Equity prof: You will require 10 hours of preparation per week. (It looks it.)
Evidence prof: You will require 3 hours of preparation per week. (Hah!)

COURSE COORDINATOR: You should take another class because the one that you wanted, contract drafting, is full and it's unlikely to have dropouts.
MR: *stupidly believes* Yeh, ok, put me down for international trade.
CLASSMATE: Guess what! I got into contract drafting because someone dropped out at the last minute.
ME: Well, damn.

ETA: Emailed CC querying sitch. CC phoned back, things clarified. Faith in humanity restored. Heh.

(I don't mind international trade... I think? I haven't had a class yet. But I would have preferred contract drafting, not least because it has no exams.)

Dear prof, why is it that you not only persist in using Arial Narrow, a font I dislike, not just for class notes but also make it a requirement of the research paper?

Feeling sneezy, which I self-diagnose as a psychosomatic symptom of "going back to school".

"The Aconagua" [2009] EWHC 1880 (Comm): about an exploding ship and whether the carrier who was entitled to an indemnity from the cargo owner for damages after the chemical carried in it ship made it exploded. It's 58 pages long, of which roughly three-quarterss are about how likely the calcium hypochloride was likely to self-ignite if put near a heat source and I nearly lost the will to live even just browsing through it.

Roper v Simmons, as mentioned in the last entry, took up about 10 minutes of class time, hardly proportionate to the time I spent reading it. That's about 90 minutes I'll never get back. I should have just wikipedia'd it.

Gotta hustle tomorrow: two presentations this week. I so hate presentations, especially group presentations.

Also, this post is likely to be emblematically ironic of me being a blabbermouth.

Had dinner the other day with an old friend and discussed, among other things (including a moment when I realised I was, like, incapable of discussing philosophy), how she felt burnt out at her job and was thinking of maybe having a career change. Friend works for the government involving something confidential that she's been very discreet about - this will become (?) relevant in a while. So, we were discussing if she were really serious about a career change it would mean possibly getting references and those would have to come from either her boss or a trusted colleague.

And she said she couldn't because that would mean having to reveal her career plans.

ME: But you could talk to someone you trusted, y/n? And ask them to keep it quiet. You've been working there for so long, there's got to be someone.
SHE: The people in my office have revealed personal stuff without meaning to. I've witnessed it.
ME: *WTF?!* But *maybe I'm being idealistic here* they work with confidential stuff, they should be able to keep their mouths shut about a minor personal thing! Especially after you've asked them to keep it quiet!
SHE: No, really, they are good people. But it's just that they make a casual comment and personal stuff comes out.
ME: *still wtf-ing* So what you're saying is, the people you work with have loose lips.
SHE: They don't mean to! It's just that because the work we do is confidential, so we let our guard down when it comes to personal stuff.
ME: *am not seeing the logic* But you just said that you don't share much personal stuff with them. It's not like you're all a big cosy happy family there. *because if you were, then you'd feel comfortable discussing your career plans with them* You keep work separate from personal. Ergo, if you talked to a trusted colleague about a personal matter, you'd expect that matter to be kept under wraps, not blurt it out in the pantry or something.
SHE: You don't understand, you don't work in my office. You don't know what it's like.
ME: Well, yes. But- *wtf* So what it comes down to is, they can't be trusted with personal stuff. They can't be trusted to be discreet.
SHE: Well, it's the pressure of having a job like ours. We deal with confidential matters that we can't discuss it with other people, so we tend to be-
ME: Loose-lipped when it comes to other matters.
SHE: It's hard to describe it when you don't know what my office is like.

Uh-huh. Very true; I conceded her point. I have zero experience with, let's say, super-duper-sekrit government stuff; I have no idea what such departments are like. Maybe no one is trustworthy enough to talk to about a career change in such an office *wtf?* Maybe it's a problem of those particular persons. (Still wtf-ing. I dunno if I should trust my government when it appears that its workers have LOOSE LIPS.)

But I have worked in normal offices with normal commercial secrets (of varying importance) and look, we've all had to be discreet about work at one point or another. I don't blab about work to other people outside of the office, much less personal stuff where I have been asked, you know, to keep quiet about. I just keep quiet. I don't care what the atmosphere of your office is like: if a colleague tells you something and asks you to keep it quiet, then by gum you do not blab it while getting a coffee at the pantry or whatever.

I don't think this is an extraordinary expectation whatever line of work you are in, or how cosy you are with your colleagues. Yes, there are blabbermouths, but the solution is to talk to people who are not blabbermouths. You can't just explain it away by saying, "We handle confidential stuff and therefore we can't keep a secret." Because it makes no sense.

Look, I know there are still anti-sodomy laws on the books in my country. Attempts to de-criminalise homosexuality have usually smashed up against an overwhelming underwhelmed majority who wonder what the fuss is about and if asked, would probably tell you that they don't know any gay people at all so they're really more concerned with jobs and the economy, thanks. There is a small group who are trying to change things, and there's another small group that says homosexuality shouldn't be de-criminalised. Y'know, my beef is not really with group B, even though I think they are wrong. My beef is that when a person from group B writes an article saying that the laws shouldn't be changed because homosexuality is bad for the community*, it pisses me off when you say things like:

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*I'm paraphrasing, of course.
**But which society's, eh?