Splitting the bill

A couple of years ago, after too many years too casually spent as a casual academic, I went to work at a law firm. It was in need of a writer, and, for a steady wage, I was willing to pretend to be one. For a time, the change felt daunting, and I eased that feeling by making a mental note of its differences with my old workplace. At the firm, everyone was smartly dressed and spit-polished; at my university, there were professors who padded the corridors with rumpled hair and bare feet. At the firm, everything was urgent; at university, nothing ever was. The firm’s tearoom was stocked with gleaming coffee machines, bowls of fresh fruit and individually packaged Tim Tams; the only things stocked in the faculty tearoom at my uni were cockroach baits and dead cockroaches.