The working life

Well, I haven't really started work yet, but I will offer a brief report of my experiences thus far. Basically, school sucks and if I ever entertained thoughts of law school, forget it. I've had enough of the formal learning stuff. They promise that we'll continue to learn over the course of our careers at the Patent Office, which is fine by me, as long as I don't have to sit in a lecture and wait for two hours to be allowed to go to the bathroom.

By the end of last week, we were working fairly independently on practice cases, so we could go to the bathroom pretty much any time we wanted. But yesterday and today, even though we were done with our classes before 4:00, we had to sit and wait until 4:00 because those are the rules. Huh?

For the record, my teacher was very, very nice and a fine instructor. And the subject matter wasn't uninteresting. I'm just used to having a job where I work on my own, according to my own schedule. And the Patent Academy simply doesn't offer that luxury. The job will, though, once I reach an adequate level of independence. That's one of the perks of this job, bless it. And I made some friends, which is something I haven't done in years! I really do think this working thing might turn out OK.

I also have sort of an Alias thing going because nobody (including me, at this point) knows my name. When I applied last June my name was one thing and now it's something different, and even though I filled out all of my employment and security forms with my new name, my email address and login ID use my old name. I thought that changing my name when I moved would keep things clean and simple, but I was wrong. And the class roster lists "Heather Anne" as my first name, which I kind of thought was stupid, but didn't bother me too much until the very nice man in charge of electronic searching of nonpatent literature repeatedly called me Heather Anne, which made me feel like a bit of a (insert word my mother wouldn't approve of, but starts with d).