Personal Disaster Kit

At work, I suppose you are accustomed to seeing mail, or boxes or letters delivered to your desk – the usual detritus of white collar life. So, I was slightly startled when yesterday afternoon, the receptionist handed me a “Personal Disaster Kit.” I wondered how he could have anticipated my need for hair dryers, hair straightening equipment, mouth wash, deodorant, feminine hygiene products or any of the other numerous consumer products without which I believe my day would end in a personal disaster?

Well, whatever I considered to be personal disasters, this little orange satchel certainly wouldn’t be able to address any of them. Displayed boldly on the front of the kit was the following message:

Personal Disaster Kit: Meets Personal Needs During the Initial 24 Hours After a Disaster
Please Insert this Label in Kit After Opening
6 Purified Water
1 Flashlight
2 AA Batteries
6 Food Bars
1 Pair Work Gloves
50 Alcohol Pads
1 Emergency Blanket
50 1” x 3 Adhesive Bandages
4 Burn Ointment
1 Cold Pack
1 Dust Mask
1 First Aid Guide
10 Facial Tissues
2 Plastic Bags
2 4” Rolled Gauze
1 Roll Tape
1 Zippered Case
Caution: This product contains natural rubber latex which may cause allergic reactions
Acme United Corporation

The Office Manager walked in a few seconds after the delivery of this kit and noted that in this post-911 era and given the fact that we were in a tall building in New York City (54th floor to be exact) one could never be to cautious. Indeed.

Looking at the list of items kindly provided to me by my employers, I ask how did Acme (the very name of the corporation invokes Warner Bros. cartoons) arrive at this particular assortment of items? Why 2 plastic bags and not 3? And surely, if I were involved in a disaster of mass proportions the least of my concerns would be a middling rubber latex allergy. I’m glad they’ve considered that we may wish to educate ourselves in the elements of First Aid once Doomsday is upon us – better late than never right? And to be fair, I’ve never known which bandage to use for which cut/scrape/bruise. But in any case, I have an unfortunate allergy to certain types of adhesives and probably wouldn’t want to touch the bandages. (I wonder why they didn’t stick a disclaimer for that ailment on the kit too?)

This reminds me of the kind of precautions they used to take in the 1950s in the aftermath of the invention of the nuclear bomb. People built bomb shelters in their basements and trained to use them in fallout situations. Surely, we couldn’t have said that was not a useful exercise – weren’t nuclear bombs pointed at this country from Cuba in the 1960s? Then again, the whole situation did end up resolving itself peacefully.

For a period of about 10 years from 1991 to 2001, there seemed so much hope for humanity. Maybe I felt it keenly since I was in my teens at the time: prosperity abounded, walls fell, Apartheid was abolished, Communism loosened its hold… Maybe this darker time will pass too. And hopefully my personal disaster kit will go the way of the fallout shelters.

First Day in a Career

It's not like I've never worked before. I've had lots of jobs... data entry, secretarial, fast-food, even the finance industry in 2005. But all those other jobs were temporary. I knew I was going back to school or moving on. I had the end date firmly fixed in my mind before I even took them on. They did not seem crucial to my identity or life in any way. This job is different. Today, I started my career.

Though I'm not admitted to the NY Bar yet (and cross my fingers I will be in November...), I am actually working as an attorney now. So it was when this morning ZW awoke at 5:30 am (her firm's first day of training lasts from 7:45 am to 10 pm!!), I woke too. There were butterflies in my stomach and I couldn't stop thinking about the upcoming day. I spent the next couple of hours packing my things and trying not to get nervous. It didn't help much that the humidity was horrible this morning in NYC - I could see the sweat soaking through my blouse and realized I would have to keep my suit jacket on to hide the patches of sweat adding to the misery caused by the heat. Damn it! - yet another thing to worry about!

Eventually, I made it out the door and onto the subway. The cars are airconditioned, so I hoped my sweat-soaked shirt would naturally dry in the train before I got to work. I didn't really want to be known as the "sweaty as a pig girl"... especially since the shirt was PINK! Damn it!

Adding to the uncertainty of the whole day, I was actually making my way to a different office. For various reasons, my departure to the Brussels office was necessarily delayed and so for one month I will be working in the New York office. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I arrived at the office. The office building near the Lexington subway stared down at me from it's great height... several dozen stories at least. After getting my bags scanned in a security machine, I picked up my temporary ID and made my way to one of the four banks of elevators. I entered the elevator and pressed the button and found that my ears popped as the elevator rushed up to its destination above the 50th floor. I tried to while away the seconds by staring at a mini-computer screen which flickered back stock quotes and the weather at me.

Things were no more certain once I got off at the floor. I wasn't really sure how to get in to the office, which seemed closed because I had arrived before 9 am. Eventually someone let me in, but she wasn't exactly sure what I was there for and it took a while for her to realize I had come to work. I sat down to wait. Sitting across form me was someone coming to interview at the firm. We began one of those nervous introductory conversations that people enter into simply because they feel they must interact to fill up the silence around them, but in which neither person is actually interested or invested. Eventually, CM and AH turned up at the office and I realized there were only going to be three of us new associates.

Once I met the other two associates and we got into training though, I was no longer worried. There was so much training to get through and so much paper to be filled out, etc... that the hours seemed to pass quite quickly. Before I knew it, it was time for lunch. The firm had organized lunch for everybody, so that we could all meet. They had even ordered a cake with our names on it, which I thought was very sweet. I made some small talk with some of the attorneys present. The office is small (only about 20 lawyers), so I wasn't overwhelmed.

In fact, some of the day had been downright cool! I still can't get used to the idea of having a secretary - who is the sweetest lady ever. Nor can I get enough of my view - I can see a good chunck of Central Park from up here!!!! AWESOME! The firm has been extremely professional and well-organized with all my equipment and materials. And everything seemed a breeze today.

Eventually I walked out of the office at 6:30 pm. Not too tired. Pleased at what had been accomplished. Looking forward to the next day, with a little less trepidation and a little more excitement. I could do this everday... in fact I have to!

Jazz in the Park

Today has been one of the most wonderful, delightful days of the entire year. The bar exam may be in 8 days, but I was blissfully happy for four hours today. This despite the fact that I was actually memorizing the law on New York Professional Responsibility during that time!!

So, what was the cause of all this zen, nirvana? I decided that my stress level had become too high and I spent four hours in Washington Square Park. The weather was wonderful. I sat on a bench in the shade and the occasional breeze cooled me down. A short while after I arrived, four musicians appeared and started setting up nearby me. There was a trumpet player in a mauve shirt and bright red hair, a double bass player sporting dreadlocks and the most crazy tie-died pants with all sorts of prints on them (CRO would have been proud), a sax player in a sports jersey, and a drummer. It took them ages to set up and I was occasionally entertained by the trumpet player throwing up his mute to chase away the pigeons that would gather from time to time in the branches above them.

Eventually they started playing. The first few songs were clearly warm ups and there was a little rust in the horn player's sound. However, soon it got really cracking. These guys were good. They could play fast and slow, they could tease the low, seductive notes out of a horn and blast the loudest, shortest, highest riffs you can imagine. The trumpeter had a neat trick of playing two horns at once. And just when you thought things couldn't get better... they had company. Ryo and Tomo (of presumably Japan - MW would be so proud) turned up. Ryo is a fantastic trumpet player and Tomo plays the guitar. The horn players were now playing off each other and it was amazing.

The park was starting to fill up. All sorts of dogs trotted by with their owners. Everybody, from the homeless, to people kitted out in Chanel, to children to elderly people, to tourists seemed to be there. A baby rushed straight for the jazz and started swaying - teetering from one foot to another on his unsteady legs. A couple of hours later, I couldn't believe it, when the band was joined by yet another musician - this time a keyboard player with the largest Afro of pure snow white. I was in bliss.

And just when I though I had stumbled into some magical wonderland, I looked up and saw a man, dressed as a Greek Orthodox priest with a bright red bicycle light flashing insistently on his belt, carrying a huge American flag and dancing vigorously to the jazz music. Well... this is New York. It had to get weird.

New York Bar Exam - 24 days to go...

This year, the New York Bar Exam is administered on July 24th and 25th. The exam consists of three parts and for the next 24 days, it will be the sole focus of my existence. Needless to say, my existence is now pure drudgery.

The first part of the exam is the Multistate Bar Exam. The MBE is supposed to test law that is relevant throughout the US (but at a level of generality that often means it does not accurately reflect the law in any particular given place). There are eight topics on the MBE: Constitutional Law, Contracts, Sales, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Real Property and Torts. The MBE is a multiple choice test, but is trickier than you might think.

The second part of the exam is the Multistate Performance Test. This test gives you 90 minutes to go through a case file (including relevant facts and law), then to respond to a request to draft a memo, brief or other legal document, relying solely on the information contained in the case file.

The last portion of the exam consists of the New York day. It will test, both using multiple choice questions and essays, the eight topics tested on the MBE but with a New York perspective, as well as the following 18 topics: Agency, Commercial Paper, Conflict of Laws, Corporations, Domestic Relations, Equity, Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure, Leases, Mortgages, New York Practice, No-Fault Insurance, Partnership, Personal Property, Professional Responsibility, Secured Transactions, Trusts, Wills, and Worker's Compensation.

Given the sheer vastness of the amount of information we are supposed to learn, I am overwhelmed, scared, freaked out... there are not enough adjectives to describe what I'm feeling really.

Here is my status report as of today. I have memorized all I wish to learn for:

Criminal Procedure
Criminal Law

Pathetic isn't it? I am currently working on Evidence.

Tense in London

This post was originally published on August 3, 2005 in a now aborted blog. However, the thoughts are interesting and so I post it here.

Closeted in Oxford, surrounded by lovely, peaceful meadows, trees, churches and scenic colleges, I've been sheltered from the news of the outside world. The recent, tragic London bombings, though they only took place 1.5 hours by car away, could have been continents removed from Oxford. I didn't quite understand their impact.

Yesterday, MW and I took one more load of stuff back down to his flat in London as part of the process of moving out of my Oxford dorm. By chance, I bought a British newspaper - being a committed ex-Yalie I usually get my news from the NY Times and avoid, perhaps unfairly, the local broadsheets. The 'Times' blared out, on its front page, that the British police, for fear of yet another horrific bombing, were out in full force. And they were! Walking towards the Embankment tube station, we saw two groups of three fully armed special forces police with the most terrifying looking semi-automatic weapons (or I believe them to be such as I have no understanding of guns - perhaps explaining why they are so frightening to me). These men were all the more striking as British police are ordinarily never armed with anything more than a nightstick (a rudimentary cudgel, if you will). Once we entered the station, several transport police, donning garish, yellow vests could be found keeping a sharp eye out and whispering to each other.

According to the newspaper, the increased police presence in the city is costing £500,000 a day. Besides the tremendous financial costs, the physical toll on the police is obvious. Everyone has been ordered to cancel holidays and the exhaustion from daily patrolling is surely taking its toll. How long can this state of affairs continue? Hard to say.

MW and I are still taking the tube though. What else is there to do? We can't drive. The traffic is awful and we need to get around. I suppose that's what many others in this city are thinking too. Life goes on, just this time with masses of armed policemen floating around the city too.

Fingerprinting Take 3

It appears money orders can be obtained at Duane Reades. For those unfamiliar, Duane Reade belong to that curious species of store that evolved to replace pharmacies after pharmacies were threatened by a new genus of supermarkets that had acquired pharmacy-like characteristics. Duane Reade belongs to the same family of stores that includes Boots (UK), London Drugs (Canada), CVS (US). The typical Duane Reade is a hybrid between the pharmacy and the convenience store (and apparently now the bank), selling anything from snacks and food staples, to cough syrup and allergy medication. Oddly enough, the managers of this particular Duane Reade saw fit to provide their money order services from their photo processing booth - perhaps there is a symbiotic relationship between the two?

Armed with my money order, I trudged back to New York City police headquarters. I was so close and I would not be defeated! I would see this fingerprinting process through today. I filed past the gate, made my way through the obstacles of the metal detector and X-ray machines, and arrived triumphantly at the fingerprinting office. The lady accepted my money and forms without protest, pausing only to make one derisory comment, when lending me a pen, that no right-thinking person would ever attempt any business without bringing a writing implement.

Finally, I was seated, waiting for my name to be called. The time passed slowly. Around me, I heard the continuous buzz of conversation in many tongues - Spanish, Russian, Italian, etc... The Russian lady ended her cell phone conversation saying she would call back her interlocutor - I did not understand the rest. I wondered why Italians always seem to wear Dolce & Gabbana. The lady at the front desk asked a Hispanic man if he was here for his immigration card - I'm not sure what he responded. Nobody seemed content though. Somebody called out a name! Not mine... a Chinese name - but oddly no Chinese lady. An Indian man came in without a money order and was sent to the post office. A name!... Italian.... Somebody said he lived in France. The other two italians pushed past the desk to be fingerprinted. The lady at the front desk began conversing warmly in Spanish with a confused man.... AND FINALLY!!! My name.

I walked quickly past the front desk and was bluntly commanded to leave my things on a chair and wait for further instruction. It appears that none of the employees of the New York City Police possess the word "please" in their vocabulary. The fingerprinter returned and as I tried to figure out how to place my finger on the ink pad, she roughly grabbed my hand and placed it on the touch screen of a computer. Where was the moist ink? the rough paper? the ink-dyed fingers? This procedure was sanitary, clean, mechanical and efficient. One by one, the fingerprinter rolled, each of my fingers for me on the screen, as the computer scanned my fingertips. And within less than 3 minutes, it was done. I was ordered back out of the back office and a short while later, the fingerprinter thrust my fingerprint cards in my hands. It was done.

Fingerprinting Take 2

This morning, I boarded the 6 train back to City Hall and back to 1 Police Plaza. My goal: a complete set of fingerprints to be sent off to the FBI.

In all honesty, I was never very keen on this task. Fingerprinting has always gone hand in hand with arrests and forensic evidence in criminal trials. I found it somewhat distasteful that I, a law-abiding citizen, would be compelled to submit to a process normally inflicted upon criminals. I pictured ink staining my fingers, like stigmata, marking me out as, at best, a person of interest to the police and at worst, a cold-hearted felon. The indignity of it all!

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I idly conjured wild conspiracy theories in which the FBI, now possessed of all 10 of my fingerprints, had all the information they would ever need to frame me for a crime. They could claim I was a bank robber in Wichita, Kansas, and they could prove it too by recreating my fingerprint! And what if one day I did commit a "crime" - something innocuous... Did I really want to hand the FBI information that would lead to my eventual conviction?

And what about privacy? Don't we all have a right to privacy - penumbral as it may be? One thing I never understood - why does the FBI need my fingerprints anyway to tell me if I have a criminal record? Surely, fingerprints lead to a criminal record and not vice versa? I'm almost positive that once the government has its grubby hands on my prints they are not going to use them for the sole purpose of granting me a criminal record. My personal information will forever be stored in some US government database, eternally part of some monumental line-up of potential suspects to a myriad of crimes.

Once I arrived at the Police Headquarters, I made my way past the front gate. There, I placed my backpack into an X-Ray machine and marched through a metal detector - no trip to a federal building would be complete without this quintessential post-911 welcoming ceremony. Finally, I actually entered the police station and noted the the front lobby was plastered with plaques honoring fallen police officers. An entire plaque (19 officers in total) displayed the names of officers who had been killed on September 11. A sobering thought.

Eventually, I found my way to the small office charged with fingerprinting for state, local and FBI criminal record searches. I presented myself to the lady at the front desk, who curtly informed me that she did not accept cash payment for the fingerprinting but could only accept a money order. As I exclaimed in despair, "A money order!", with traditional New York brusqueness, she rapidly repeated her instruction even faster and louder as if that would somehow get the information more easily through my thick skull.

Sachertorte

I visited Vienna in the summer of 1999. It was to be my grand tour of Europe - a time of revelation - like Isabel Archer's trip to Europe (replete with beautiful art and unfortunate incidents in Italy). Vienna was HG's idea. She had taken a course in architecture at Yale and wanted to see the great wonders of Europe in person.

I don't remember a great deal now about our five days in Vienna, but I do remember being disappointed. I could only think of what once was, circa 1890s, before the madness of the World Wars. What was St. Stephen's Cathedral without its patchwork green, black and yellow roof, like a crazy quilt coming apart at its seams? Having seen almost every surviving Klimt at the Osterreichische Museum für Angewandte Kunst, I couldn't help feeling the loss of the four burned by the Nazis in their desperate retreat from the advancing Allied line. Visiting the Schoenbrunn Palace - still boasting impressive rooms and one of the largest hedge garden mazes in the world - I couldn't help but wonder, while reading about Empress Sisi, what this place was like when it was the throbbing center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What's the point of a Ringstrasse anyway, if there are no luxurious carriages to parade on it? Beautiful as Vienna was, it only seemed to be a pale, starving waif of a city compared to what it must have been over a century ago.

Regardless, there was one thing that I remember differently. HG suggested going to the Hotel Sacher to have a slice of Sachertorte and she was quite keen on it. The words meant nothing to me at the time except that I remembered faintly from my year of German lessons that "torte" meant cake. We arrived at the the hotel and ordered a slice each of very expensive chocolate cake. It was heavenly. Not too sweet. Just a little tart. Served with a dollop of Schlagsahne. Perfect. If nothing else, I was eating like an Empress.

A few days ago, I had some vistors from Austria. I had never met them before and was not quite sure what to expect, but they did bring me something familiar as a gift from Austria: the famous Viennese Sachertorte. As the brochure included with the cake tells you, "The history of the world-famous Original Sachertorte began in 1832, when the 16 year-old apprentice cook Franz Sacher created this dessert at the court of Price Metternich. In the meantime, it has become the most famous torte in the world and the hand-written recipe is a "state secret" of the hotel."

Despite the Hotel's efforts at keeping the public from its recipe, the Internet can tell you at least this much: "The cake consists of two layers of dense, not overly sweet chocolate dough with a thin layer of apricot jam in the middle and dark chocolate icing with shreds of chocolate on the top and sides." And no matter how the cake was baked, it was delicious. It reminded me of carefree days in Central Europe and absolute decadence.

Times Square

You always remember the first time you went to Times Square.

For me, that was at least 10 years ago - on my first trip abroad without my parents. I emerged from the subway (it must have been the NQRW Times Square stop) and found myself face to face with three African-American men dressed in full samurai gear, complete with armour and swords. Passionately, they gestured to the crowd standing curiously about them and preached racial hatred, while directly opposite them - not even 15 feet away - three police officers leant lethargically against a police car, watching the scene with mild amusement. All around were the giant, insistent, screaming TV screens of Times Square, hawking their wares.

I turned the corner to find a massive Disney Store. One of the many much vaunted improvements brought to the New York City landscape as part of Rudy Guiliani's attempt to clean up this chaotic metropolis. Out with the XXX stores, seedy bars and heavens forbid... jaywalkers. NYC was to become the new Disneyland - a clean, completely commercial caricature of its older self - ... until you turned the corner to find the the XXX stores that survived the Guiliani sweep.

June 2007 - Times Square has got a lot bigger. Not the Square precisely. But the screens now extend for about 7 blocks, where I'm sure they didn't before. There's a massive ferris wheel in the Toy's 'R' Us store and a marvelous M&M store (two stories with every M&M inspired knick knack and souvenir you can think of - pillows, to plates to golf balls). I bought a few circular plates with large M&M faces on them. The Hershey's store paled in comparison.

On this day, we passed a man in the square, who was dressed as Spiderman and another man with a massive albino python wrapped around his neck and chest. Pickpockets, people selling knockoffs, and peddlars all out to make a buck, competed with the raving, screeching TV screens. Some things don't change.

Fingerprinting Take 1

Today, I traveled to 1 Police Plaza downtown to get fingerprinted by the police. This is the first step towards obtaining an FBI criminal record search . The police headquarters are very close to City Hall and were quite easy to find.

However, having completed my journey without a hitch, it did not come entirely as a suprise when bad luck struck. The offices were exceptionally (and perhaps inexplicably) closed due to the return of US soldiers from Iraq - or so I was informed by the big, burly police officer guarding the headquarters. Being small, I decided this was sufficient answer. I will be returning later to be fingerprinted.