The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
I love women. Definitely in the abstract, and plenty of individual ones as well.
My boss is a woman, the majority of the attorneys and staff in the firm are women.
My best paralegal is a dude, it does so happen.
But I'm just too tuned in as to the sort of trends you're observing and what they mean to feel completely comfortable about where this is going.
Similar with law school.
And there's been an absolute rash of female judges behaving quite badly and unbefitting of their role in the Judicial system. Its annoyingly hard to try and maintain faith in said system in light of this. Justices Barrett and Kagan testifying in congress that they feel unsafe due to the heat brought towards them and their families for doing their job doesn't help.
Oh, and I am currently running a case where my client is a neurotic woman, the opposing party is a neurotic woman, who was previously represented by a neurotic woman, and is currently represented by a neurotic woman who has a neurotic woman legal assistant. I am dragging this case forward by my fingernails and billing appropriately, but its absolutely ridiculous that this whole thing could have been resolve six months ago if the people involved were willing to sit in a room together and hash it out. But that appears to be a literal impossibility due to the personalities involved.
I keep myself sane by working on my classic muscle car and driving it on the weekends to restore my testosterone reserves.
My sibling was fairly neurotic and I believe it’s one of the major reasons we never got along, so I know the feeling; and they inherited that from our mother. When they would go on one of their insane and anger filled tirades or crazes, the only way to get ahold of the situation was to absolutely scream at them because they would endlessly beat a dead horse, kick you while you were down and constantly rag on your ass. I always had a much more stoic and martial attitude that I inherited from my father, which naturally made our personalities almost completely incompatible with each other. The most extreme arguments we ever had always reminded me of this scene in Rush Hour; which is exactly what I wanted from them. Stand still, quit moving, sit down and shut the fuck up, or I will twist the knife as hard as I can until I make you stop it. They had no capability to control and moderate themselves and just Did. Not. Know. When. To. Stop.
In your case though, I’d imagine this is somewhat more common. Aren’t most of the people that need legal assistance precisely those kinds of people that possess problems with others and the law?
I'm fairly neurotic at a baseline. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years progressively addressing both the symptoms and the root causes. I also inherited it from my mother. My dad is stoic in the extreme. I'm currently playing a mix of hawaiian slack-key guitar music, some classic exotica, and Spanish New Age Flamenco music (Govi is AWESOME) because its soothing without making me sleepy.
I sympathize with the neurotics, but if they're not at least trying to be better and curb their worst tendencies... I want them far away from me. This includes some of my family members.
YES.
And more to the point, those are the cases that by definition tend to drag the longest. So they're the 'stickiest' clients. Which means even if it starts out where only 10% of my caseload is those types, eventually, if I don't filter, those cases become 50% or more simply because they fill all my time and crowd out new clients and I slowly close out matters for the more reasonable clients.
I've adjusted my intake process to account for this and I quote a significantly higher retainer if I suspect you'll be that type of client.
I work in a very different field but consistently find that those of my clients which are least profitable are also by far the most troublesome.
Tax accountant here. Also true in this industry. The ones that are least likely to be able to pay our fee are also the ones that are least likely to be able to pay for a proper bookkeeper to get their accounts in order, and also can't pay their tax debts. Their information all comes in late because they're disorganised and time-poor and they tend to have far less leeway with the tax office to ask for an extension. You end up spending a significant amount of time fixing their errors, and negotiating with the tax office on their behalf trying to make sure that they don't bring the Legal Hammer down.
Working with these clients is like fighting a losing battle. Soul-destroying experience, business failure just compounds and compounds and compounds to the point that keeping anything afloat becomes a herculean task.
Its always a bit funny when I have a consult with a client with a lot of unsecured debt, and they've been dodging collections for years, and I advise them they can either figure out a way to pay the debt (maybe get the amount owed reduced), wait decades for it to become noncollectable, or declare bankruptcy. There are minor asset protection strategies but the debt will not just disappear if you hide your property.
Then they want me to take on a case for them and be like "can I pay you later? Maybe on installments?"
Oh honey. You just spent a half hour explaining to me that you can't be trusted with credit.
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