Friday, November 09, 2012
The Criminal Element
As I may have mentioned, my new job involves criminal law on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about lame ass federal law, like drugs or conspiracy or something. This is real Law & Order type crime here -- murder, rape, child molestation. So by and large, this makes for interesting days; reading about the unspeakably horrible things people do to one another generally keeps a person awake. (Although there's a definite exception to this for days where I'm struggling to get through transcripts of expert testimony; you would be surprised by how boring blood spatter patterns can be.) It also, however, does have a bit of an impact on your view of the world. Today, for instance, I was working on a case where a guy killed his business partner and I started wondering if there might be someone around my office who wanted to kill me and I didn't even know about it. I actually came up with some pretty good suspects. And often I now find myself looking around the train at my fellow citizens and contemplating which ones are murderers or sex perverts. Again, many good suspects. When you read about crime all day, it does sort of start to seem like crime is everywhere.
Of course, at my old job, there was plenty of crime, too, it was just carefully papered over with many layers of money. And it tended to be less dramatic, like someone putting the decimal point in the wrong place in an SEC filing. Don't get me wrong, though -- I'm totally in favor of the death penalty for accountants. Double entry bookkeeping is just Satanism with better PR.
As I may have mentioned, my new job involves criminal law on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about lame ass federal law, like drugs or conspiracy or something. This is real Law & Order type crime here -- murder, rape, child molestation. So by and large, this makes for interesting days; reading about the unspeakably horrible things people do to one another generally keeps a person awake. (Although there's a definite exception to this for days where I'm struggling to get through transcripts of expert testimony; you would be surprised by how boring blood spatter patterns can be.) It also, however, does have a bit of an impact on your view of the world. Today, for instance, I was working on a case where a guy killed his business partner and I started wondering if there might be someone around my office who wanted to kill me and I didn't even know about it. I actually came up with some pretty good suspects. And often I now find myself looking around the train at my fellow citizens and contemplating which ones are murderers or sex perverts. Again, many good suspects. When you read about crime all day, it does sort of start to seem like crime is everywhere.
Of course, at my old job, there was plenty of crime, too, it was just carefully papered over with many layers of money. And it tended to be less dramatic, like someone putting the decimal point in the wrong place in an SEC filing. Don't get me wrong, though -- I'm totally in favor of the death penalty for accountants. Double entry bookkeeping is just Satanism with better PR.
