So, some years back, I just started up as a lawyer (I specialised in Property Law.).

The pay is shit and it is really cut-throat environment, since the firms usually hire like 3 people for 1 job and tell them that after one year, two of the three get fired. So you dig in, do long hours without pay and distrust your colleges.

It was hard and my relationship actually suffered a lot because of me working and not daring to take my holidays but since it's hard to lock down a job I went for it and finally got my contract renewed. Pay got better and I got small cases. Rather small stuff that was only research to find applicable laws and terms in contracts, so a settlement outside of court could be reached. Quite often it would be a landlord who wanted a tenant gone or a tenant who wanted the landlord to fix something, as I said usual stuff.

One day however I got this Mail forwarded directly by one of our seniors (which is highly unusual) who wanted me to take a look at a case and stated something along the lines of “me earning my spurs”. I was surprised at first, since it seemed like a strange case involving toxic wastes used as filler in the walls of a tenant. Not really my field of expertise and way to hot of a topic for me to handle. After this massage I was on high alert, still expecting a test for the new guy. I was getting a little paranoid, since I couldn’t really trust my colleges and ask them for help and I couldn’t get any information about the case from our secretary (who usually handled first-contacts and redirected them) since the case number was unknown to her. After one or two days of trying to find anything about that case – via name, case number etc, I called the senior lawyer up and asked for a talk the next day to clear up some questions regarding the case.

That night I didn’t really sleep much and the next day I was so nervous I was feeling sick – after all I had to tell one of my bosses that I couldn’t handle the case, since I can’t find any information about it, making me look totally incompetent.

I went in and just started blubbering out about “how the case was strange and I didn’t know how to form an angle of attack, since the information in the mail were quite spare and I couldn’t find anything about it in the files” and so on, getting riled up since I was on my last legs. He just looked at me the whole time as if he didn’t even know what I was talking about. So I kind of just stopped mid-sentence and asked him (I guess I was basically yelling) what the hell was going on.

He told me to take a seat and to calm down and he would explain everything to me. “Before I do so however I just need one thing from you” he said while I was sitting down. I was a complete wreck and expected him to ask me to sign some legal document about non-disclosure or something. But he just said "I need about Tree Fiddy".

Now it was around this time when I realized my boss was 7 stories tall and was actually a crustacean from the Paleozoic era. Goddamn Nessie! That goddamn Loch Ness monster had gotten me again. I stood there screaming at him about what the fuck was going on as he swam into the distance.

I quit my job the next day and didn’t work as a lawyer since that day Tl;dr: I quit my job after I got a strange case from one of my bosses.