I never really dreamt of being a lawyer. I’ve told this story a million times, but I landed up being in law because of a poor choice on my degree application form. I got into architecture at 2 universities, and at the last minute decided that I would slowly go nuts if I had to draw buildings everyday of my life (- instead I land up drafting the leases for those buildings every day instead). My second choice on the application was Bachelor of Arts. And you cant do much with a BA, so I did LLB…and you can do much with an LLB without articles. And so on….

So here I sit today, well entrenched in the legal system, enjoying the fruits of my indecision and laziness of 10 years ago. So let me tell you 10 things that (really) suck about being a lawyer (from pretty bad to worst):

10.
Stress: Its not the kind of stress of meeting a deadline. Or the fact that your boss may have lost his brain at birth. It’s the fact that all your work is (1) urgent and (2) of vital importance. If you screw up the world will certainly end. And that’s just the contract for the coffee machine outside.

9.
Not really fun: No matter how much you might believe its like “The Practice” or (even more bizarrely) Ally McBeal, the legal world is nothing like that portrayed in Hollywood. Most litigating lawyers spend their days writing letters to their opponents threatening them with some well thought out sarcasm, or if they are lucky, paginating the judge’s papers. The sad reality is that most lawyers you will meet will tell you how they would rather be irrigating crops in the Sudan, or doing ballet somewhere, than practicing law.

8.
Most politicians are lawyers: enough said.

7.
“Non lawyer” interaction: Lawyers don’t walk around all day talking formally to each other. The ultimate buffoonery is when some non-lawyer decides to talk to me ‘formally’. I speak English you fool! Instead I get e-mails saying things like “See you at your earliest convenience” and “Please peruse the contents of the joke attached hereto”. It’s like writing in COBOL to an engineer and asking him to join you for lunch.

6.
Paper: Closely related to 7 above (you see, I cant even write this without referencing it like a lawyer), is the fact that there is paper everywhere. In this day and age of the paperless environment, lawyers still manage to bury themselves under mountains of paperwork. The reason – just in case you need to litigate one day, you need to ensure that you have copies of EVERYTHING. Whether its relevant or not, a lawyer must keep everything. I’m sure I even have some “Post Its” with invaluable tidbits stuck away somewhere (in a safe).

5.
People believe you want to talk about the law all day: Im sure this applies to all professions, but I really couldn’t care less about the latest trial on the abuse of baboons in Malaysia, or that the lawyer in your divorce case was really nasty and brought up that thing where you got arrested for being naked in a shopping centre.

4.
Aggression: Im not sure if this is a love or hate item, but most of the day as a lawyer you get to either (1) take abuse from an opponent or (2) have to dish out some abuse at a collegue or an opponent. My wife especially loves this quality in me when I start cross questioning her over what she says to me – particularly when I tell her her comments are “overruled” and “sustained”.

3.
Speeding ticket advice: After spending 5 years at university, doing 2 years of articles and then another 2 years of doing your Masters, the best thing is that people still approach you for advice about their speeding tickets. The fact is that they don’t even bother to teach you about that stuff at university, yet every Joe you meet believes you have an innate desire to learn about the legalities of their speeding ticket. All you need to really know is that the traffic prosecutors are fond of girls in short dresses – there is no “law” involved.

2.
Reading lots of documentation: Lets not kid – this takes up 90% of my day. I get to read page after page of boring legal wording. A pet hate of mine is negotiating with clients who haven’t figured out how to use the reviewing tools in Word, and who make changes to the 500 page document without telling you where the changes are. I swear this stuff is worse than ancient Japanese water torture – there’s nothing more torturous than having to negotiate a warranties clause with another lawyer, and having to discuss the Roman law exceptions to the common law.

1.
Whenever you enter a meeting you WILL be greeted with some stupid lawyer joke: This occurs without delay at just about every meeting I have with clients, and its usually that really crappy one about 1000 lawyers at the bottom of the see being a good start. I have started taking a drum into meetings so Im prepared for the drum roll.

I remember the good old days – 1997 to be precise. Getting to work was easy. Hopped in the car, when I wanted to and within 20 or so minutes was safely at work. Door to door. 20 miles. Easy as sleazy.

Not so living in the big city. You have to run to someone else’s schedule. We call someone else the demon goddess of fate. And boy is she a bitch!

07:40: Plenty of time to make the 07:57, all going well!
07:54: WTF happened to the time. Rush for the door.
07:57: Can hear the train coming and don’t have a tickets. [lots of swearing]. Rush up the stairs. Queue too long at the ticket office. Rush down the stairs. Mutter under breath about slow people in the queue.
07:59: Get ticket. Machine actually accepts crinkly old tenner. Thank the goddess.
08:00: Rush up the stairs. See train disappear off around the bend. It’s ok, back up train is at 08:02
08:08: See the 08:02 coming. Start moving towards the font of the train. See lots of people doing the same. Revaluate. Move to back of train.
08:09: Squeeze on to carriage with 5 billion other people.
08:10: Slowly position body so that if any one gets up from their seat, I only have two girls and a druggie to beat to the seat.
08:12: Get to Clapham Junction. People get off. Dive for seat,
08:13: Glare at women who just got off and PUT HER NEWSPAPER in the bin between the seats. How dare she. Doesn’t she know people are bored. SHARE dammit.
08:14: Surrpitously fish paper out of bin when no one is looking. Enjoy paper all the way to waterloo. Use mp3 player set to XFM to drown out reality
08:22: Get to Waterloo. Make man check my ticket properly. I paid for it he is damn well going to check it.
08:23: Pick up metro to read on the way home. Take the second one from the top.
08:24: Star walking to the office. This coincides with the rain starting.
08:34: Arrive at office looking like a drowned rat. Get told I need to go to other office to get my laptop check. Some crap about a virus. I’m to decaffeinated to argue.
08:44: Arrive at random office. Get signed in after 5 minute pointless conversation
08:49: Stand in queue to have laptop checked. Dream of rabbits getting maimed. This is no fluffy bunny of a day.
08:59: Laptop is checked. All ok. Surprise I know what I am doing. Sign piece of paper that says if the network goes down it’s my fault and they can legally shoot me.
09:00: Head back to the office. Stand in two separate puddles. Get rained on more. At least my hair is not sticking up like it was this morning.
09:10: Get too office.
09:11: Boot up laptop
09:15: Start fixing my email which is broken because of me or virus. Unknown
10:00: Start working
23:30: Stop working. Walk to station. Crank the Mp3 loud to stop the thinking. Prodigy Voodoo People does the trick. Not raining. Shock horror.
23:38: Buy monthly travel card. That’s 990 Rand. That’s more than the cost of 100 beers. Still at least I have an extra 6 minutes tomorrow in not standing in queue.
23:42: Get on train take out this mornings paper. Read the bit that’s not ruined by the rain.
00:02: Get off train. Star dancing on the way home in the street. Almost break laptop as bag not zipped shut from when morning’s paper removed. Stop dancing.
00:09: Get home.

People shooting at you? Peace of cake. Try getting on a crowded train for real commuter rage.

Thanks again Karen for the guest spot here at Uborka. Im not sure it was a good idea to get Sevitz or I ranting too much, but anyway.

So today, we’ve decided on stress and commutting in our respective cities.
Getting to work in the mornings here in Joburg is stressful. It’s not easy to say why you get to the office so stressed, but you do. There are many reports this side of the world that explain that road rage is a big problem in South Africa. Its probably one of the only places in the world where you can actually see people get out of their cars (early in the morning) and stand and scream at other drivers. Hey, if you are lucky, they might even pull out a gun and start shooting.

Ok, so it’s not that bad every morning. Most of us don’t carry guns, and just sit in the traffic taking in what’s going on around us. It’s just that in order to get to work you need to either use your own car (if you lucky enough to be able to do so) or you are forced to make use of taxis.

Taxis
For most Joburgers this is the only method they have. There aren’t any fancy modes of transport (the government here are only now planning on getting some kind of ‘tube’ together – I personally look forward to that day in 2008), and that means that most people have to use a taxi. No, it’s not a taxi like you would think. A taxi in SA refers to a combi Van.

What’s the problem with that, you ask?
Well firstly, taxi’s are usually driven by people who are not licensed. That means they can’t read. Or drive. Most taxi drivers are not concerned about road rules either. They go through traffic lights (yes, they drive through when they are green if they are in a hurry), cross over solid lines and (everyone’s favourite) drive in the emergency lane when they need to get somewhere quickly.

Secondly, taxi’s stop. Whether you are on the highway or just driving down a small street, a taxi can stop at any time, and offload passengers. That means that all the traffic behind must automatically stop as well, and you’d better hope that your ABS is working. Swearing and hooting generally follow soon thereafter, sometimes accompanied by that infamous gunshot.

Roadside sales assistants
On your way to work you WILL be greeted at every intersection by at least 2 people who will try to sell you some junk you don’t want. This can include anything from pirated DVD’s to magic sets to (my personal favourite) Yassar Arafat dolls (come on – who the hell actually buys that).
It makes no difference if you tell the person that you are not interested in buying anything. You can say it nicely or you can threaten to drive over the “roadside sales assistant” – either way he will still stand there flashing his goods insisting that you actually need that wood glue.
Luckily I’ve now got aircon in my car, so I can close the window. Suckers whose windows are open have papers thrust in through the window, and often land up with a whole collection of pen sets that they will never use. Even so, I still have to face sales assistants who (1) offer to wash my car window with some brown water scooped off the side of the road or (2) who throw their plastic snake on my windshield.

So you can see why most Joburg drivers just ignore what’s going on around them. If you had to take in all this kind of stimulus all day you would surely be bonkers. And aside from an earthquake or nuclear bomb going off in the road, the average South African driver will ignore everything around him until he parks his car at work.

Conclusion
So that brings me to my first visit to the UK. I got to a pedestrian crossing. I ran across the road, and when I looked back I realised that the cars had actually stopped. Cars were not hooting at me, and there was no-one sticking their head out of the window throwing obscenities at me. The UK – you guys have it good over there…

In 1977, the obscure American band Ram Jam adopted blues cult hero Leadbelly’s song “Black Betty” as part of the band’s proposed conquest of the world’s airwaves. It was no wonder that world domination was not immediately forthcoming, and the song (which dealt with a singing dancing insane blind lady) would be eternally destined to be a marginalized favourite played in seedy dark alternative clubs.
The same seedy dark alternative clubs where I first saw a young Adrian Sevitz do “the scarecrow” to the aforementioned Ram Jam hit. The scarecrow to those of you who don’t know, is the alternative equivalent to Hip Hop’s breakdancing (but don’t tell that to any Goth, unless you want your teeth removed). The participant stands in the middle of the dancefloor, with his or her arms to the side, swaying in the (proverbial) wind like a scarecrow.

Being the young impressionable guy that I was, I found the behavior strange. But strange behaviour was what I had come to expect of Adrian.
I had first met him a few years before the scarecrow incident when I attended a party and met Adrian through a common friend of ours. I found Adrian to be rude and abrasive, having an awful resemblance to Edward Scissorhands and constantly threatening to kick everyone in the shin with his Doc Martins. Fearing for the sustainability of my shins, I avoided him for the rest of the evening and many years thereafter. The years passed and he attended the same university as me. I was the arts student sleeping most of the day on the lawns, and he was the engineer, learning how IP packets can be rerouted through Latvia to reduce Internet costs. I would meet him at lunch, where he sat and carved up tables with his pocket knife and we would discuss life, girls and him kicking my shins over lunch. It’s weird how friendships form when something is threatening to kick you in the shins the whole time.

But back to the Black Betty incident. After seeing the strange scarecrow moves on the dancefloor, I instantaneously decided that from that moment onwards he would be known as Black Betty. That in turn lead to the idea of a comic strip featuring Adrian as the main protagonist – the comic would be called Black Betty Seabitch (to rhyme with Sevitz), and would deal with the adventures of an aggressive Goth who goes around dancing like a scarecrow, and kicking people in the shins. The lines between Sevitz and Seabitch were thinly drawn.
The whole novelty of this cartoon was however that Betty gets killed by the second strip in every installment (usually by a bus running him over).

Well, time went on and Adrian changed. Soon that long black hair and stubble that had become synonymous with the Black Betty persona were replaced by what I like to refer to as the “Reg Dwight Years”. Overnight the Goth was transformed into one of those Anderson Consulting types – dressing in the blue checked shirt and chinos, and saying things like “action item”, “synergize” and “drill down deep to the core of the problem”. The kind of thing Dilbert cartoons are made of.
Before I could say “Way down in Alabam”, the whole image of Black Betty had been dissolved and Adrian Sevitz had become something else. He left South Africa, venturing off to find brighter pastures in London posing as a “Saffer”, and leaving behind his past to embrace that new future.

I often sat by myself wondering who I would now mock. Sure there were lots of people out there worthy of being mocked for no reason, but none of them lived up to the high standards of mockable activity set by Sevitz. Then one day it changed. He sent me a mail (together with the 567 other recipients) stating that he had created a new website. At first this seemed trivial – I mean, how much could one person really write about themselves and mail to the world? Adrian tested that boundary. On sevitz.com we learnt how Adrian picked up woman, moved into his new flat and (famously) posted a picture of his leg in stockings and Docs on the net. And who can forget the Reg Dwight glasses, that we thought were a joke, but really weren’t.

So is Sevitz still Black Betty Seabitch or has he moved on? I think it’s a bit of both. Sure we can all admit that he has the propensity to still kick you in the shin because he feels like it, but Sevitz these days is synonymous with Sevitz.com. Today he stands as a legend in the blogging fraternity. A commentator of the postmodern world.
No, Black Betty has not gone. He has just grown up. Long live Adrian Sevitz. Long live Black Betty Seabitch.