I hate being busy.I've been so busy for so many months now. I miss having time to myself. My work is getting busier, and more demanding. In a way that's good because it helps me to be more productive and to really get my priorities straight. But it's also really difficult to keep up the pace. Ever since the beginning of summer I have had court deadlines non-stop. And they just keep coming. This week I finished one brief, wrote two others, including one start-to-finish in four hours today, and filed an answer to a complaint. Plus all my subway rides home this week have been spent editing documents, and I probably did some amount of work on 10 other cases that are all at different stages.
I have figured out the reason for all this work. I work in an office with about 21 lawyers, most of whom are women. Our work is assigned on a rotation. So every time someone drops out of the rotation for some reason, that means more cases get assigned to the rest of us, plus all of their cases must get reassigned. Here's the rub - right now my office appears to be a baby factory. One woman has been out on maternity leave for about 5 months, another just went out last week, one just came back (for 3 days a week). And there are two other women who are pregnant and will go out on leave eventually. Plus there are 3 young, married women, all of whom are going to have children in the very near future.
This amounts to a lot of new and reassigned cases on my desk.
I know this is a very un-feminist thing to say, and typically I am liberal on such issues, but if my boss doesn't start hiring men who cannot get pregnant and go on leave, I am going to have find a job where my co-workers baby-making preferences don't effect my workload and, by extension, my free time. If they want to have kids and make their lives busier then that is their business and, hey, more power to them. But I have a cat, not a kid, BECAUSE I don't want to have a busy life right now. When other womens' decisions to have children cut into my ability to get home at a decent time at night, something just is not right. I should get to take non-maternity leave to get a break from all the work their kids are causing me!
