Paved with Good Intentions

In case anyone hasn't read this good article by Colin Goh, you should do just that right now..

Anyways, this post is going to be really boring, and for my own amusement.

U'd think I was crazy, but the highlight of the day actually arose from work. To cut the boring story really short, parliament tabled a bill last week on amendments to adopt a more modern and internationally recognised convention to replace the antiquated convention that Singapore now uses to calculate limitation of liability for vessels..

The issue in question has vexed eminent professors and senior counsel for at least 15 years, but parties always settle the claim so as not to lose all if they were to lose the court fight. This resulted in there not being binding precedents that we could use. For 2 months last year, I did ridiculous research that led just about no where cos there were persuasive arguments in favour of either view which were so finely-balanced no one could really say.. With an ex-boss like mine, those weeks were living hell.. The draft text of the Bill came today as vindication that even parliament admitted that the state of the law was a horrendous mess, so there u go, buster..

I guess that was 1 of the files that really made me decide to quit practice in a law firm.. and reading Colin Goh's article at the right time really made things a lot surer... in fact, some of the similarities were downright freaky cos the number of lawyers who did / went through the same kinda thing were miniscule, like:
a. we belonged to the specialised breed called shipping litigators in Singapore's 2 blue-blooded law firms;
b. on good days, what I thought of my boss was that I wouldn't want to be 45 and still be pulling my hair out distinguishing X Court of Appeal case from my clients' at 10:30pm (on bad days, ...);
c. I nearly seriously injured myself slipping down the 40m-high gangway of a huge-ass totally unladen oil tanker (I also lost my precious $400+ Mont Blanc fountain pen whilst paying off the crew of a discrepit ship one day, btw.. freaking painful).

I prepared my CV over a few evenings in the office, and spoke with 4 recruiters... only 2 seemed genuinely interested... or at least, genuinely interested in the money I could possibly bring them.. no news followed for some 2 months, and in the meantime I was back to slogging, until that fateful day in September.. the rest, as u know, is history..

The past couple of weeks, I've been re-doing my CV.. I saw the long list of files I stated in the CV that landed my current job, and am truly amazed what they saw in it to even think of hiring me.. heh.. hell, what I do now has less than 10% relevance to what I used to do!

I called up my ex-teammate to give him the heads-up on the new Bill at 8:40pm, and true to form, he was at his desk.. a few stories about the ex-boss' latest antics later, I swear for the 736th time you can chop off my whatever if I were to ever go back to practice...