law review lens

I'm an articles editor for law review, which means that four times a year, I edit an article written by some academic. For this task, I get a group of staffers, ranging from two to six, who spend an inordinate amount of time checking citations and verifying the author's sources. For the most part, I enjoy working with the staffers because I feel like I am helping them build their various law review skills and perhaps readying them for being on next year's editorial board.

I'm learning a lot about myself through this process. For instance, I'm really bad at talking in front of people. I knew that I had this problem, but I didn't realize the extent of it until now. I have meetings with my staffers every so often, and they also come up to me in the office to ask me random questions. Despite the fact that they are essentially my underlings and they need to kiss my ass for good recommendations, I get nervous talking to them. Very lame. I try not to show any sign of weakness, but it's hard to tell what their perspective is. So I go all Napoleon-complex on them and freak out if they turn in assignments late, for instance, in the vain hope that being a hardass will hide my insecurities.

I've also learned that people who don't pay attention to details drive me crazy. One of my staffers is no doubt very smart and very capable of doing more complex tasks than citechecking. But he really sucks at citechecking, which makes my job more annoying. He should probably get a little slack because it's only his second or third time doing this, but I have a team of six during this production cycle, and he misses simple things that each of the other five staffers picked up the first time. He also annoys me because he spends so much time on the assignments, writing me these long memos about how he reached certain decisions, but he doesn't even see the missing period at the end of the sentence! I'm annoyed also because I think he thinks he's really smart and doesn't need to read the Blueblook, but the Bluebook is all we have to go by! I try not to show my annoyance, but that, like my insecurities, probably shines through. Damn my expressive face!