Holiday Gift Giving at this Paralegal's Firm

Every once in awhile, one of my guilty pleasures is to visit Bitter Lawyer or some other website full of equally snide, vile, or snarky comments from the ranks of the unhappy lawyer world. I'm not sure why I look specifically for unhappy and sarcastic lawyers... perhaps it is because I have not found a site for unhappy and sarcastic paralegals yet. The comments seem to perk my mood in much the same way soap operas do. Reading them makes me realize how good my life really is. If some fellow making four times my salary working in a firm with marble floors and taking home a bonus the size of my yearly paycheck is unhappy with his life, then my little ol' apartment, broken TV and barely running car seem less tragic.

So when I found the Above the Law open thread, Making the Holidays Happy for Your Secretary / Administrative Staff (thanks to Lynne DeVenny at Practical Paralegalism), I jumped for joy. With all of the painful delight that tonguing a loose tooth brings, I read some of the super bitter comments with a smirk. Not all of them were horrible. There exist, after all, wonderful people in the legal field. However, very many of the comments seemed to come from people who were unhappy with their assistants (or maybe just their lives).

While I feel devilish for taking a little pleasure out of the pain of these commentators, I can't help but feel that many of them bring it on themselves. For instance, # 27 suggested, "give them more paper. That's all the bonus secretaries want anyway."

Number 35 suggested, "CHECK YOUR SECRETARY. If she's not working right now her bonus should be $0." Number 35 should look up the word "irony" in the dictionary and hope his/her supervisor doesn't read Above the Law open threads.

Number 42 was going to give his secretary a take-out box of his lunch leftovers while Number 55 thinks his secretary has a bad attitude because she's "taking orders from someone half her age." (Methinks the problem might not be the age difference...)

And it looks like Number 103's deep seeded respect for firm staff, as exhibited in his response to a secretary's remark, will get him far in life: "What exactly are you "knocking out of the park" for your boss? The work you do isn't exactly cerebral....do you consider formatting a document to be "knocking it out of the park?" You sound out of touch with reality."

Some of these guys needed to take the advice of Number 63, who said, "if you're willing to be cool with the secs who hook you up, you'll find life easier in big law. that [sic] being said, secs like that are rare."

Fortunately for me, my Boss is not the Bitter Lawyer or ATL type. Though I didn't expect a thing, he walked into the office this morning and handed me a beautifully wrapped box. Inside were four long-stemmed wine glasses with fun yet classy polka dots all over them (which I'm sure the wife picked out - thank the good Lord for Bosses' wives).

I'm not sure what I did in a previous life to somehow avoid working with jaded, depressed, or elitist attorneys in this one. Sometimes those attitudes seem rampant in the legal field. Thankfully, at least in my part of the world, such personalities are few and far between.

Oh, and lest you worry that I didn't do my part in the holiday exchanging of gifts, I gave the Boss a very manly candle (oxymoron?) for his office.