Whinge

It's Monday night and I'm tired. Tired from the following:

1) Being under pressure to confidently butterfly my way to the other end of the pool when dumped in the deep end, despite only being able to dog-paddle with floaties on.
I just feel like there's so much pressure on me (whether it be from myself or from someone else...generally I reckon it's from myself. I dislike not being on top of things) to learn things really fast and get a grip on situations really quickly. I feel like managers are expecting me to come up with some fantastically insightful contribution (despite the fact that they probably expect no such thing) and I'm tired from feeling icky when I don't know something and have to ask (I hate asking people things! This is not to say I'm afraid of asking- I just don't like it and it takes me a good 5-10 minutes to work up the nerve to do so, as I simultaneously berate myself internally for being a boob about it) and from trying to desperately retain everything I've been told so I don't have to ask in the first place. Ergh!

2) Having no one around to talk to about this stuff.
One of the positives these big firms loudly trumpet when recruiting is the fantastic support you receive through the buddy system. It's probably telling that I never heard such trumpets while being recruited, because I feel no such support. The division is so small that there's other grad and I, then a whole host of other people who are manager and above. My so-called 'buddy' is a senior manager, who happened to be my boss on my last project, when a buddy is usually a 2nd or 3rd year grad. It's not like I would pour out my life's woes to them or anything, but it would help if there's someone I could discuss these things with who didn't have a power of review over me! =p Oh, and as for my proper manager, I haven't even met her yet. Gah.

3) Stupid quantitative work keeps finding me, and other career relevant issues.
I've already done some work (probably very badly done work at that) preparing a presentation on regression analysis (think 1st year QMB and good old Louis Yeung! =p), and the other day a director called to ask whether I could do some data analysis for him on Excel. When I said no, I'm sorry I'm not very good with Excel, he replied that maybe I should brush up on my Excel skills with a few courses. Well, sorry, but Excel, and numbers and formulae in general do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT FORM A PART OF MY FUTURE CAREER PLANS. GAH. I want NOTHING to do with that sort of thing! NOTHING. However, I AM in an area that does concentrate on financial institutions, and probably to progress I should know a thing or two about that kind of thing. Which leads me to conclude that I probably don't want to stay there forever. Which in turn leads me to think, the longer I stay, the further I go down a path away from law, which is what I want to do. I can see how what I'm doing now can have SOME relevance to a future career in law, but if I just keep getting compliance audit work, it's going to get really old pretty fast.

4) Oh, CRAP it's my parents' 30th wedding anniversary in less than a month
Kill me now.............




(Can you tell? I have PMS. =p)