Out of the mouths of babes

If you go to a school that follows the English system, you are required to go through work experience for a week when you are sixteen. This is meant to introduce you to the working world at an early age and also give you (more) conviction as to your chosen study path (in the U.K., you apply for universities based on predicted grades at this stage). My colleague's sixteen year old daughter came along to the office this week to study the habitat of lawyers. She was immediately put to menial tasks in the library, so I thought she didn't really get a lot of insight into the working world of law. How wrong I was.

We invited her out for lunch. Her dad obviously worried about what we were saying to her and what she would be saying to us, as he asked to come along when he found out about the lunch. She came with her tousled shoulder-length blonde hair, strappy beach sandals and a crumpled shirt over a jeans skirt. Most of us were in our 'office casual' clothes - clothes that represent the paradoxical institutionalised informality that is known as 'office casual', stuff you wouldn't ever wear outside of the office. She managed quite well until the point when two of my colleagues started discussing a case. She put down her chopsticks and said accusingly to her dad, "I've had four lunches this week with you and every time we've talked about work. Can't we talk about something else?"
Her dad promptly turned pink and I quickly asked her whether she'd seen The Motorcycle Diaries. But this only lasted a minute. One colleague laid out his (somewhat half-baked) plans to remove himself from the rat race, and then he and the girl's dad ended up talking shop again. The girl grumbled, "I don't know if I ever want to be a lawyer. Everyone seems to be complaining about their work all the time." I told her that journalists would probably be the same if you put a bunch of them together (she wants to become a TV reporter first), but even while telling her that, I thought she saw more of what we are really like than we would ever care to admit - boring, cliquey and most of the time desperately stressed out.

Last night, for the umpteenth time, I thought about what else I could be other than a lawyer.