Time to hit the want ads

I was in a foul mood all week and was more cranky than usual at work. Minor annoyances were making me far angrier than they should have. I was snappish and had no patience. I didn’t even enjoy being around myself, I was so sullen and bitchy.

Now, part of that can be attributed to good old PMS, but the fact is that I’ve been at this job for a year and four months now, and I’ve never liked it. Some days are more tolerable than others, but I’ve never felt like, “Hey, I really like this job!” So I thought about it this past week and realized it’s because I’m so ridiculously underutilized there. I don’t want to sound all snobby or arrogant, but frankly, this job is beneath me.

At my last job, since it was a very small firm, I did a little bit of everything. Some of it was the mundane crap for which I am overqualified, such as answering the phones or making travel arrangements for my boss or ordering office supplies, but much of what I did was substantive and interesting. After my boss met with a new client, he’d hand me a stack of paperwork and his notes and I would open the file and then set about drafting whatever documents were needed – probate or guardianship applications, wills and powers of attorney, an answer to a lawsuit, whatever. I don’t get to do any such thing at my current job. All I do is the piddly administrative crap that I hate to do. One of my bosses has a meeting fetish and is constantly asking me to order lunch for some pointless meeting or other. Another has a penchant for traveling around to our other offices in the name of “client development” (although she never brings in a single new client) and is always having me make her travel arrangements. Instead of drafting legal documents, all I do with them is stick them in the mail or send them off with a courier to be filed with the court. I guess this is one major difference between a small firm and a large firm – there are so many layers in a large firm that one’s job responsibilities are very compartmentalized and there is little chance to branch out or assume greater responsibilities.

The only remotely interesting thing I do at work now is proofread and edit documents. Word has gotten out around the firm that I am a kick-ass proofreader with mad language skills, so a lot of attorneys I don't even technically work for have taken to sending me briefs and pleadings and memos and such to proofread and edit for them. That beats the hell out of the administrative crap, but it's still not very substantive or interesting, and it doesn't fill enough of my time.

In any event, this job is killing my brain cells and turning me into a person I don’t want to be. I spend much of my time there just surfing the web because I having nothing else to do. If I don’t get out of there, I’m going to start losing the skills I developed over my previous seven years in this field and I’m also going to turn into a bitter and angry person. So, rather than being miserable at work every day and then whining about it on my blog, I’m going to start actively seeking a job with a small firm, preferably one that specializes in probate and estate planning, since that’s what I really enjoyed doing at my last job. In the meanwhile, I’m going to try not to let my current job put me in such a bad mood.

There are certain downsides to working in smaller firms – the pay and benefits are not as good, for one thing. I can live with a pretty sizeable pay cut and a less impressive benefits package, however, if I’m actually happy with my job and enjoy being at work.