New job found, will to live lost

Right… well I would like to dedicate this blog to the Law Society. For those who are fortunate enough to have no idea who the Law Society is, they are the body responsible for all solicitors in England and Wales. They are a bit like a trade union, in that a solicitor has to pay them over £1000 ever year just so they can do the job. However, when ever the Government buggers the profession (like they always do with legal aid), the Society is totally useless and nothing gets done to actually help. Fair, no?

However, the reason I hate them at the moment is for the hoops i have to jump through to qualify. Every trainee solicitor (for that is what my job title be) has to work in 3 areas of law, and at least 1 of these has to be dull… i mean “non-contentious”. And so, I have been seconded out to Coventry to experience 4 months of conveyancing. This means wearing a suit every day, and spending 8 hours in an office staring at bits of paper. There’s just nothing interesting about the work at all.

What happens when someone is buying a house, is that he or she will work out what property is available, at the price they can afford, and whether they want to live in a small town overrun by heroin smoking teenagers. They will then instruct a solicitor to check out the property legally. This means they check that there’s no outstanding debts or obligations attached to the property, that there isn’t going to be a nuclear reactor built in the field next to you, and that you will actually be able to get from the public highways to your front door.

Thrilling so far, don’t you think.

But that’s more or less it. And to do this pant-stiffeningly exciting job you have to do approximately 700 different forms, each specific for a single task. There is even a form to tell the Government that you don’t have to pay them any Stamp Duty… You can’t simply just tell them if you DO have to pay anything, that would be too simple.

At one point yesterday, I was sat in a presentation and I was so bored, I think a fifth of my brain decided to just die. I had the most horrendous headache, and was forced to just sit there and endure death by powerpoint about HiPs (Home Information Packs… don’t ask, it’s just too depressing to even begin to contemplate). To make matters worse, My right arm then decided it would rather twinge in pain than sit and atrophy. All this, while some surveyor basically said “We don’t know what we are going to have to do in 3 months time when these buggers are compulsory.”

Bring back my glory days of burglars, smack-heads, and suspected kiddie-fiddlers. Actually… just the first 2 please, as I hate having to argue with the police about how computer memory caches work!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.