Last Friday, whilst my team was out for our Staff Bonding Day, news came that our PB* letters (emails, rather) had been disseminated. I reached an entirely new level of IDGAF-ery, even for me (pardon my French and the many parentheses), when I was given a lift back to office where I'd parked my car, but immediately hotfooted it to the same and raced home to get in a nap before picking the boys up from childcare.
*For the avoidance of doubt, that's Personal Bonus, not Personal Best (though I hope to hit some running ones later this year) or Peanut Butter.
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I've done a search of my archives, and although I've shared it on Facebook, I don't think I've actually mentioned this in a blog post before. So for what it's worth, I am setting it out here although you all probably know this already.
When I left practice in 2012 and finally got called for the Legal Service interview, one of the first few questions I was asked was, of course, why I left practice. I'd thought about my answer to this long and hard before the interview, and against the advice of friends who had taken this path before me, I decided to be honest and say that one of the main reasons was that I wanted to have more time to cook and clean for my husband. Because it was the truth, and I knew that if I gave the "stock answer" about wanting to make a difference, serve Singapore, blah blah blah, it would definitely show that I was just saying what I thought the interviewers wanted to hear. I had barely graduated three years ago, what would I truly know about the public service? (I did eventually get appointed as a prosecutor, so I must have answered the other questions "correctly".)
Before I applied, I told myself that whatever it was, I would, as much as possible, let go of the competitiveness and pride which fuelled me in practice, and not care about others' pay, bonuses, and promotion. Especially members of the opposite sex whom I didn't feel were particularly worthy*.
*That's not to say I don't agree with the Government's stance on treating NS as two years' working experience - on the contrary, I think it's laudable, but it is rather galling in some instances, though these have been remarkably few. Okay just one instance lah. You want to know who, you can PM me. (It would be apt to insert a LOL here, so, LOL.)
Also, I'd taken more than a third of a pay cut when I left practice and joined the Legal Service (yes, lawyers earn an obscene amount of money, and I am not kvetching, just stating a fact).
In a bid to live up to this goal I set for myself (amongst other goals, such as always maintaining a good standard of English and being kind to and patient with my subordinates), all emails and manuals which set out in long, painful detail things like our bonus structure, promotion criteria, etc., were cursorily glanced through and deleted or shredded, depending on whether they were in electronic or paper form. Horrific, I know, especially since I am in the business of telling people to read the d*mned documents, but the upside of it was that I was always pleasantly surprised by "random" bonus payments or merit increments, because I never expected them or knew that they were coming.
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I think the true test of my resolve, however, has been the fact that in my four or so years in the Legal Service (discounting the year off I took when Daniel was born), I've never been assigned a case that has been particularly worth bragging about, so to speak. Now, getting assigned to "big" and "important" (read: billable hour generating) cases was what it was all about in practice. In fact, I used to feel a tad upset when the partner-in-charge assigned cases to others whom I felt wouldn't do as good a job as me*. So to not mind about this wasn't exactly an easy thing to do.
*Don't bluff, I know you also felt that way when you were young and starting out.
Granted, my name was in the papers a few times (cheap thrill! And then there was the time I referred to an offender in a statutory rape case as a "bread maker" - because he made bread dough which was then sent out to bakeries and baked there, so he technically wasn't a baker, right? - and it was reported as such and Hardwarezoners had a field day for some reason which was truly awful), but they were run of the mill cases that didn't get me much, if any, face time with the Powers That Be. In fact, there was one matter which one of my previous directors tried very kindly to get me to follow through on to "increase my visibility", but that was quietly transferred away to someone else at some point by another director*.
*I was very bitter then, and it definitely stung, but only for a while. It's not like it was my matter to begin with, you know? Ah, how much it mattered back then, how little it matters now.
I must now digress to the time just after I started work following my maternity leave with Andrew.
Before I went off to get induced, Jon told me that he was Very Sure some of my matters would still be there when I was back from maternity leave, so I should stop pushing myself so hard to hand over everything (I still did). Sure enough, he was right, and I spent my first week or so back in the office re-acquainting myself with a ring binder (okay, one only, not like in practice where there are 12328437876871 ring binders to go through during Discovery - you win!) full of documents pertaining to a particularly tedious matter involving irate parents (wow, what's new?). It took every ounce of concentration I had, fuelled by the rush of FINALLY being back at work, to go through everything again, take into consideration the new information which had come in, do further legal research, and draft an updated piece of advice.
That was when it struck me that not everything you do at work needs to be "glamorous" and "exciting"- or even newsworthy. After all these years, it came to me then, as I trawled through a very long SGCA judgment (they are all quite long nowadays hor?), that the run of the mill work needs to be done by someone, and done well at that, and even if it's not stuff that will get you a higher bonus or a faster promotion - does it really matter? Especially in the public service? After all, whatever I do is for Singapore's greater good, right?
I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter, but I don't think I'm wrong in saying that we can choose how much we want it to matter, or if we want it to matter at all.
All that navel-gazing led me to look back on my time as prosecutor, and realise that the two matters I found truly meaningful and memorable were run of the mill ones (I had never given much thought to my time as a prosecutor before, about a year after I joined Jon had his tumour and then we had Daniel and off I went to my current Ministry).
The first involved two streetwalkers who had been charged for gang robbery. Their defence counsel was the esteemed Mr Gregory Vijayendran, assisted by Mr Jason Gabriel Chiang (some years my junior in law school I think) who had taken up the case pro bono. It was just another PG mention I was assigned, and other members of the "gang" had already been convicted on that charge, but the judge directed that the prosecution give consideration to Mr Vijayendran's impassioned mitigation plea and the facts at hand, and decide if a lesser charge was perhaps warranted, because their role in the robberies had been so minor.
We ended up (rightly) reducing the charge for these two women, who were at the time not much older than me, and I'd like to think that made a significant enough difference to their lives because they didn't have to serve such long sentences. I was also touched by the effort Mr Vijayendran and Jason had put into preparing the mitigation plea; having been in practice, I could tell it was a solid effort which must have taken them some time to put together, including travelling to Changi Prison to interview their clients.
The second involved an uncle who had climbed into a series of hawker stalls via the opening at the top of the stalls - you know the kind, the sheltered, high-roofed hawker centres where walls which are not connected to the ceiling separate the stalls - and managed to steal S$400 from one of the stalls, the tau huay one, if I remember correctly. He'd been caught on a CCTV at the neighbouring Tiong Bahru Pao stall, but still insisted that it wasn't him. That case was memorable because it was so interesting interacting with all the hawker stall aunties who had to come and give evidence, and they all came dressed in their "formal" attire of polo shirt, jeans, and sports shoes. I remember the tau huay stall auntie in particular, she had to put on her reading glasses to look at my map of the hawker centre, and she peered over the top of them when she was done, in true auntie fashion. The judge who heard the case was the current State Coroner, Mr Marvin Bay, and he was very kind and gentlemanly to all the aunties, thanking them all warmly at the end of the half-day hearing for taking the time to give evidence.
And at my current Ministry? Last year, at a lateish stage in my pregnancy with Andrew, I spent some nights at home (one night is one night too many. Haha.) mulling over a case I felt strongly about, reading cases and discussing the current state of the law with Jon, just to try and justify a position I wanted to take, knowing in my heart that it might all be for naught because my director would disagree with me - which he eventually did. One of my most memorable cases which I can mention in a public forum, albeit obliquely, involved a fridge which a vendor had left behind in a school canteen - I was introduced to the legal concept of an involuntary bailee, and had a good time reading the accompanying case law (legislation has been enacted to deal with this in the UK, so the cases were rather dated but all the more interesting for that). The tedious matter I started working on again when I came back from maternity leave is still there; I hope my recommendations pass muster, and will help someone find closure.
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A wise friend said, when I was contemplating finding a part-time in-house role during my one year break with Daniel, that I had better make sure I found my job worthwhile and meaningful because I was going to be spending so much time away from my children. I ended up staying in the Legal Service, and I'm glad I stuck it out. I may never have realised the meaningfulness of my job otherwise, nor learnt to see and be grateful for all the mercies great and small, that God has given me in this regard.
