As Busy as I've Ever Been

Yep, that's my mantra lately. I am literally as busy at my job as I have ever been, in my entire life. And as someone who always carries a heavy workload in comparison to my peers, believe you me: this is not fun. At all. I mean, it's one thing when the airhead across the way, for whom its all she can do to even show her face in the office for maybe 30, 32 hours a week, tops. You give her a bit of extra work, and even though she feels like she is falling off a cliff, I don't give a shit. She deserves it, in fact. Or the lazyshiat down the hall, who will complain all day about the hours he has to work but then somehow manages to "work from home" at least two days a week, when his IM shows him as being completely away from his pc for hours at a time during business hours. But when I get heaped on top of my pile another 25-50% more work than I am already carrying, that really means something, and frankly it takes me to a place where I literally cannot get anything else done in the day but work, work and more work.

Over the past few weeks, I am up at the absolute crack of dawn -- earlier even -- and I'm the first one into my office shortly after 7am, where I proceed to sit at my pc and bang out contracts, dial in to negotiations and participate in various and sundry meetings, conversations and strategy sessions, until around 7pm when the sun is already on its way back down for the night. This week will make a complete five-day work week where I was not even afforded the opportunity to go and grab a quick lunch, not from a deli and not even one of those carts that midtown Manhattan is so famous for. And as if it's not insult enough that I work 12 hours a day in my office when pretty much the entire rest of my colleagues show up for more like the usual 9 or 10 -- on a good day! -- lately, when I finally get home around 8 at night, I have to immediately fire up the laptop and am back working on that contract markup before my work shoes are even off, my lenses are out and often literally before I even sit down. That's just how much I have to get to, how much more than is possibly able to be done by a normal person in a normal day.

So if you've been wondering why you haven't seen me on the virtual tables almost at all in the past couple of weeks (or much here at the blog, either, for that matter), no I haven't changed my username to protect my anonymity, and no I didn't finally stick my head through my laptop screen after one too many 2-outers on the river. I just haven't even had the time to sit the fuck down and do something I want to do, even at night when I'm home after a long, long day in the office.

Here's hoping that Friday night will be my first night truly off from work in about 2 1/2 weeks thanks to a couple of marathon sessions over the past couple of weekends that had me sitting in my office for a full day all alone on Saturdays and Sundays. And if I haven't returned your emails this week, don't take it personally (well, you should take it personally, but the rest of you, please don't). This weekend I am desperately hoping to get that break to catch up on everything else in my life outside of work work work work work.

Random Thoughts

I've been utterly swamped over these past few days with issues both personal and work-related, but I've got about a gillion random thoughts in my head that I thought I would get into a post here in no particular order while I have a minute to come up for air.

Check out Tiger Woods. Divorced for all of one day, and comes out and fires his best round of the year. Nice media coverage while Tiger was hitting rock bottom right in front of our eyes just a few weeks ago, where nary a single reporter, news outlet, blogger or anything else I saw managed to make the connection or even to mention at the time that Tiger was just finalizing his divorce. That weekend Tiger shot +18 and finished in second-to-last place in the tournament, the guy was literally probably having knock-down, drag-out screaming fights with his soon to be ex-wife about money, where to live, what to do with the kids, etc. If you ever doubted that golf was mostly a mental game, what Tiger did on Thursday after the year he has had on the links pretty much puts that question to rest.

And then check out the Philadelphia Phillies. In a crucial four-day period that sees the NL East-leading Braves going to play a tough Colorado team on the road, we have the NL-worst Astros coming in to our house for a 4-game set where we should be able to pick up a couple of games and basically be tied with the Braves for the divisional lead, heading into the last 35-40 games of the 2010 regular season. Instead, the Phils get their asses swept at home by the lowly Astros, missing four chances to pick up games in the postseason race, and leaving themselves a full 3 games back in the division and already out of the wildcard lead as we head into our second west coast trip of the season, where we traditionally have fared horribly. That is as pathetic a performance as this team has come up with in the past few years. As I've said all season long, this team just seems to have lost that "eye of the tiger" that they clearly have had the past couple of seasons. The Roy Oswalt trade was another stroke of genius for this team and GM Ruben Amaro, but it seems less and less like their year in 2010 with every passing week of games in the books.

Does anybody remember what the end of August used to be like when we were kids? I do. It was hot. Effing steamy, sweaty, muggy hot. Every year, all of August was basically hot as hell in the northeast, you could count on it as surely as the sun coming up each day. Well, nowadays have you noticed how the summer is basically over in the northeastern U.S. by the middle of August? Anybody who makes beach plans for the last couple of weeks before Labor Day these days better pack their sweaters and some windbreakers, cuz once again we are looking at 70-degree high days and lows in the evenings dropping into the 50s. Global warming my ass.

This week I had one of the biggest morons I work for -- a guy who is so clueless at what we do that I must have had 50 or 60 conversations with others about how inept and unskilled he is at this job over the past year or so -- advise me "don't ever let yourself think that I am infallible" when he found an error he had made in something that I had not commented on previously. Of course, the first 185 times I found similar errors in his work, I did point it out to him, and 185 times I got a predictably unintelligible response justifying why his language was better than my suggestion, even when pointing out things like obvious typos and blatant problems in syntax with some language in his agreements. But then he finds an error and now I should always remember that he isn't infallible. I'll have to try to remember that. Maybe I'll tie a string around my finger so every time I see it it will remind me that this clown is not infallible. It's just so rich.

While I'm on the topic, we had our annual review process at work a month or two ago, and I really cannot imagine anyone being worse at administering this process than my current employers. These people seem to view the reviews as their opportunity to mention every single specific mistake you've made over the past year, instead of focusing on the way you did your job overall for the past 12 months. I mean, if I respond to every request within 10 minutes, maybe three or four hundred times over a year, but then exactly one time I miss an email and do not respond to one request for two hours, am I supposed to show up at my review and hear all about that one fuckup and how I need to set more realistic deadlines for my work? Or should I hear how great a job I did at setting deadlines and responding promptly to requests over hundreds of instances over a 12-month period? I know I have my own experiences in conducting reviews and others' viewpoints may not necessarily agree with my own, but I feel like this is a very clear answer, and yet the powers that be at my job simply do not get that. I mean, when you've got 24 different people reviewing your performance, and 23 of you know with total confidence that you are a certain way, but then one outlier jackass reviewer makes a negative comment that the other 23 powers that be know is simply not an accurate reflection of how you actually performed, how does that one outlier comment find its way into the review? Can people really be that clueless about how the annual review process is supposed to work?

I guess that's all for now. I've got a million things going on and it's a good bet you'll get to read about most of them in the coming weeks right here on the blog. For now, enjoy what is likely to be the last 90-degree day of the year in the NY area on Sunday and try to get in your last bits of fun before summer officially departs us once again.

Next

Needless to say, a lot has happened in the past couple days here in Hammer Land.

Of course, I gave my notice at work. Once I am gone maybe I'll spend some more time writing about it, but suffice it to say that the past year or so in this job has been some of the most tumultuous and really just the craziest times I have had in my professional life of more than ten years as a corporate lawyer. My company has basically gone from the best-performing company (stock market wise) over the past fifteen years in a very high-flying sector of the marketplace, to the biggest decliner in the group with suddenly significant doubts about its ability to survive very much longer at all. How exactly this happened remains a mystery to us all as employees as much as it is to investors and anyone but I imagine the extremely in-the-know within this company. But living it has been, in a word, horrible.

Yes, I have had well-documented issues with my boss with regards to my own individual situation at work. But in the end, all that stuff became trivial basically as soon as 2008 began, when our stock really began declining, and the rumors started swirling that the company might actually be in some trouble. Ever since then it's been like a downward spiral. Truly, I am one of the lucky ones getting out now as it seems more and more likely every day that we will become insolvent, get bought, or undergo some other major corporate transaction. The thought of the great, great people I've worked with all having the ongoing existence of their jobs threatened literally makes me sick to my stomach. I have to try not to think about it several times every day. But it just makes it all the more clear why I have to leave.

And no, I'm not planning to be a professional gambler.

It's funny to me, really. Would any of you out there doubt that I am among the most pompous assiest people who ever lived? Certainly I'm not arguing it. But the funny thing is, even I don't think I could make it as a professional gambler. And you know I think I'm better than you at poker, make no mistake about it. But even I don't actually entertain actual thoughts of actually playing poker for a living. Never. I mean, I used to. When I first started playing regularly online a few years back, that was like my ultimate dream. F the Man, quit my job and just play online poker and be rich, of course that's what I wanted.

But then I got realistic. I got a whole lot of poker experience, probably a million hands in my first year or so (edit: ok fine, that number is far too high, what's the diff though?), hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of tournaments under my belt, and I realized how utterly foolish those plans were, for me. I literally would not be able to make nearly enough money to live the way I want my family to live if all I did was play poker. There is no limit in any game in cash, and no buyin level of poker tournament, where I could make anything approaching the money from my day job, nor anywhere near enough to live on. Not even a very poor existence, I couldn't even support that. My ROI in tournaments just on full tilt this year is what, about 10%? That means I would have to play $300,000 worth of tournaments a year just to make 30 large? I could not come close to playing 300k of tournaments, nor could I come close to living on 30k a year at this point in my life.

And don't get me wrong. It is patently obvious that there are a good number of people out there who can make it in life playing professionally. Some people can live a whole lot cheaper than I am looking to live right now. And that's great, if it helps you to be able to make all your money just from poker, then I think that's the coolest fuckin thing in the world. Other people are a hundred times better than me at the kinds of poker that can make them the most consistent money. High stakes cash players who are good, for example, can make sickass money from just regular good-player win rates at the high levels. I blow at high stakes cash. Similarly, the truly greatest online poker players have big big ROIs and can easily win hundreds of thousands a year in online mtt profits.

But that is just not me. I'm not good enough. I'm not devoted enough. I'm not patient enough. I'm not even-keeled enough. I always play at my best when I'm having fun, and poker as a fun hobby on which I don't rely in the least for personal income has been the only way the game has ever worked out for me. If I had to play to make money to support myself and my family, I just know I couldn't do it. I'm just not cut out to be a professional poker player. For all my pomposity, I know I don't have the mentality or the game for it.

I get a lil' bit of a kick whenever a blogger leaves their current job for whatever reason, and suddenly everyone is all "go pro! go pro!" on their asses. I appreciate greatly the support, but being a poker pro is just not for me. And unlike almost every lawyer I know, I absolutely love my day job. I mean, I really love what I do. And I'm going to move on to another company to keep doing my thing. Like I said, once I am gone from this place perhaps I will write more about my experiences after what I truly believe has been a noteworthy experience that an actual good writer could probably put out an awesome book about, about working in this industry, and in particular at my company, for the past year since the onset of the crippling credit crunch that has gripped our country. But starting now I guess I will have a whole new company -- my new employer -- to protect and to not reveal the identity of here on the blog.

More to come. Looking forward to the Mookie tonight, the only blonkament I am really in to these days to tell the truth. 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "vegas1".

Notice

I noticed it from the moment I woke up this morning. As usual my own personal alarm clock for the past nearly five years straight has been my daughter M. Literally my wife and I haven't set an alarm clock even once that I can recall since I think the very day she was born. Anyways, from the second that I first opened my eyes on Monday morning, from the very moment I first reached that tipping point between the fog of sleep and the dawn of recognition, I could tell something was different.

I think I first noticed the visual signs sometime during my morning shower. It's hard to pinpoint the exact difference, but I think it was mostly along the edges of random objects. A little shine on the corner here, a glint on an edge there, that sort of thing. When I saw myself in the mirror for the first time after I stepped out of the shower, I thought I looked a little different too. It's like I was seeing clearer or something, more in focus than I had before. Definitely something like that.

The symptoms only grew as the morning wore on. On the subway, my balance was impeccable, like I was sharing a purpose with the train or something. When people spoke, I was hearing nuances to the sounds that I had never noticed before, hidden intonations I never knew were there underneath. As I walked towards my office building in midtown Manhattan, the normal city smells of coffee, cigarettes and the occasional garbage truck wafted through me at levels of intensity I could not recall. Approaching my building entrance, I remember remarking to myself that I could barely feel my legs moving or even touching the ground at all. I floated from street to street, intersection to intersection, as much a part of the rat race as ever, and yet somehow feeling for the first time in a long time apart from it. Above it even.

As I boarded the elevator up to my office, I thought to myself that this is one of those mornings that is kinda like the Matrix: you really can't describe it, you just have to experience it for yourself. Words cannot describe the feeling on a day like this, all the little ways that things look, smell and just seem different thanks to the richness of a new perspective.

Ten minutes ago, I left my boss's office after giving him my notice that I will be leaving his employ.

My boss is so cute. He sincerely believes management is going to come up with a bunch of cash and promises sufficient to get me to stay. Sadly, my company is more likely to need money from me these days than it is to have any money to give me.

So in the immortal words of George Kostanza, "I'm out, baby!!!"

And it feels sooooo good.

President's Day, Don't Forget the Math, and Another Tournament Hit

Happy Presidents' Day to all of you out there, and hopefully most of you get to enjoy a nice day off today as we celebrate the birthdays of some of this country's greatest men. It was fun trying to explain to M and K today that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were two of the greatest figures in U.S. history, and then realizing that both the biggest bridge and the biggest tunnel leading into New York City are named after these two guys. The Hammer Girls got a real kick out of that and it made me look like I was actually telling them the truth which is always good.

For me, the stock market is closed today and that means my work is closed as well. And speaking of work, I should belatedly mention that it looks like I will be sticking around my current company, at least for the time being. Long story short, the situation there is still far from perfect, but as a well-earned and well-deserved reaction to my performance there and to my voiced dissatisfaction with certain elements of the job, I have been awarded a nice promotion that will have a small team of four lawyers and analysts reporting to me going forward. That was supposed to start officially last week, but one of the players involved is dissatisfied with the new arrangement and took last week "working from home" while she decides if she is going to stay with the company and report to me or just quit entirely. Option B would be preferable, believe you me, at which point I can just go and hire someone new for that particular position. But we'll see how that ends up. Anyways so I will continue to passively look around for that perfect job that this one still is not, but for now I have been given what I want which is more responsibility and an ability to be clearly progressing in my current job, so the active job search that -- let me tell you -- was literally one or two days away from ending with me giving in my official notice, looks like it has been stalled for a while while I figure out what my new role is all about.

Oh yeah, don't forget this:



We're on tonight, holiday be damned, just like we always are every Monday night of the year without exceptions. See you at 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "hammer" for some fun 6-max nlh tournament action with the blonkeys.

Anyways, that's all I've got for you today as I normally take the holidays off to be with the Hammer Family. I will leave you with one screenshot from my weekend play, however, which came from this past Saturday night, this time on pokerstars. It is the pokerstars version of the 50-50, which also runs at 9:30pm ET every night and also has a $50 buyin, but with a 55k guarantee instead of full tilt's 50k. Anyways, just five days after my run to 3rd place and $4900 in the full tilt 50-50 tournament, there was this:



Booooooooom!! I will post more about this run when I'm back at it on Tuesday, which included me having a decent chip lead with 4 players remaining before I flubbed it up and gave it all away. But I'll take it as you can probably imagine, and I just wanted to post a sneak preview here for all the haters. You know who you are.

Have a happy holiday everyone, and I'll be back here on Tuesday. And I'll see you tonight at 10pm ET for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!