Dictionary[dot]com defines a “Citiot” as follows:
“a city dweller who, when visiting or vacationing in the country, is perceived as being condescending to the locals and generally ill-equipped to be in a suburban or rural setting: applied especially in upstate New York to a tourist from New York City.”
It then gives two examples of how the term can be used in a sentence:
“These citiots come up here to enjoy the peaceful pace of country life and then go ballistic if they get stuck behind a hay wagon for a few minutes.”
“I may have a Ph.D. in agronomy, but I know what it’s like to have some citiot speak to me very slowly as if I’m an illiterate hick fathered by my cousin.”
That is a pretty good definition, but I would add one more category, which would be “someone who moves to the country and then complains about why life there is not more like life in the city, or even worse, expects people to accommodate their expectations.”
Since I moved to the country, I have done my absolute best not to be a citiot. Occasionally I fail, usually when the urge strikes me to show people how smart I am. When I feel myself slipping, I think back to my experiences as lawyer in a mid-sized suburban firm observing lawyers joining our firm from Big Law. They had good reasons for leaving Big Law, but somehow once they got to our firm they had forgotten about those and started to think about how we could change to be more like the firms that they had left. They would offer helpful suggestions about how we could improve to be more like Big Law, often surprised that we were sophisticated enough to have already considered and rejected some of those ideas.
One of my former partners was an excellent commercial litigator who left Big Law for what she perceived as a slower and healthier pace at our firm. After a few years she went right back to Big Law when she discovered that while the rest of us were working less and enjoying more, she was working just as hard as ever, but earning less. The frenzy of her life was an inside job, and since she could not fix us out in the burbs, she figured that she might as well earn the big bucks.
We had other lawyers join our firm from time to time from the Big City and bring their ideas with them. Some of the new ideas were excellent and we were happy to have them. Others were not consistent with our culture, and we declined to implement them. But whether or not we chose to adapt our culture to the newcomers, the people who succeeded were those who did not arrive with the arrogant superiority of a citiot.
The lesson for lateral transfers going down market? Check out the culture of the firm that you want to join and if you decide to make the leap, be humble.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.