Thursday, August 31, 2006

Lawyer Bashing

My Higher Power has a fabulous sense of humor.

She must. I work for lawyers. Isn't that hilarious? Remember that poem called "If" about "keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs"? That pretty much sums up life at a law firm. I have seen grown women and men, officers of the court, have mental meltdowns over things such as waylaid FedEx deliveries and missing messengers, and come completely unglued when their "draw" (paycheck) was withheld because THEY failed to enter their billable hours for an entire month out of sheer laziness.

They really like to come apart at the seams over their clients. And we're not talking about criminal clients here... our clients are mostly corporations. None of our clients is about to be strapped into the electric chair, upriver at Sing Sing. I have never once, in eight years, had to "get the governor on the other line" while we tried to finagle some lifesaving loophole in the law.

Bascially, lawyers just help rich people fight over money. Or help rich people stay out of jail.

And if anyone out there in WebBlogLand is naive enough to think that the practice of law is some altruistic pursuit, please remember this:

"Lawyers, as a group, are about as dedicated to bringing justice to the world as the Electric Company is dedicated to bringing it light."

Lawyers also have some very annoying habits. Number One is their habit of doing absolutely nothing all week until Friday afternoon at 3:00. Then they get VERY inspired to do all kinds of things. Usually, things designed to clear their desks off and to turn mine into the Black Hole of Calcutta, just when I'm trying to get out the door for the weekend.

Another very annoying habit of lawyers is how they lurk in their offices all day. I could sit at my desk for hours and never budge and not hear a peep out of my partners. Then I'll go to the bathroom. When I return, oh, say, 3 or 4 minutes later, there'll be a pile of work on my chair, at least 3 feet high, along with a note complaining that I'm "never" at my desk. They especially like that one. You can hear the stifled snickers coming from behind their closed office doors.

Finally, they love to bite all the hands that feed them and then expect to be patted on their heads for it. They'll totally screw up doing their secretary's annual evaluation (usually they won't even bother doing it), and then fail to understand why their secretary is unhappy that she or he only got the same bare-bones raise that everybody else got for the year. They're like the worst brats in the neighborhood, yet at the same time they're bottomless pits of emotional neediness.

They are completely unaware of how much effort actually goes into making their cushy little lives possible. Those same lives that they constantly complain are not good enough. They excel at the fine arts of Entitlement and Ungratefulness.

Lawyers. Feh.

Jack Cade's unnamed follower was right. "The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers." - Henry VI, Part II

Except for the ones we love, of course.

Thus endeth the lesson for today.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Hitting the Boards


By way of introduction, that's me over there, next to the "Toaster."

My friend Bev has a blog. She's had a blog since they were written on papyrus. I've been reading her blog forever. Then, one day, it hit me...

"HEY" i said, "i CAN PUBLISH A BLOG, TOO!!!" - ignoring, for just a moment, the fact that the world wasn't exactly crying out for yet another self-absorbed, self-published, writer. I had had a youthful (drunken) affair with one of those and know, from harsh first-hand experience, that nobody wants to hang around with those buttholes.

Buttholes notwithstanding, this is my first stab at it. So be kind, please, gentle reader. My nerves shatter easily and, being 1/4 Irish, I quickly develop massive, bitter resentments.

I hope to use this space to elucidate, enumerate and inculcate. I want to proselytize, aggrandize and anesthetize. But mostly, I want to make my reader(s) realize what wiser minds than I have finally realized...

that 10 out of 10 people die, so

QUIT TAKING YOURSELVES SO D*MNED SERIOUSLY!

Thus endeth the lesson for today.