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.

Country Clients Are the Best

As I begin this post, I'm lamenting the fact that all the holiday goodness going on has kept me from posting as much as I should over the past couple of weeks. But here I sit, wearing an odd mix of comfy/work clothes, taking a time out before I finish sloughing off the work day, writing to give you, dear reader, a sense of what the holidays have been for me so far. Only then will I complete the transformation from WorkMel to PresentWrappingVeggingOutMel.

I basically want to take a moment to praise country clients. As a small town paralegal, I do not make a top bracket income. My firm does not have marble floors, we barely have enough room for our closed files, and sometimes my Boss walks around the office in his socks. (Though, to be fair, he does wear shoes to court.) My point is that we are not fancy shmancy or rich.

However, we are wealthy with good clients. Last week, as I was speaking to the clerk's office on the phone, one of these clients walked in the door holding two Christmas-tree-shaped platters full of cupcakes and cookies. One for the Boss, and one for me. "Ho ho ho," she said, before slipping back out the door, presumably to continue making the rounds with her homemade goodies.

One of our small business clients came by later with a basket full of canned deliciousness. Not your store-bought canned goods, either. I'm saying, someone picked these vegetables then spent all day canning them. We had pickled string beans, pickled okra, homemade tomato juice, homemade pepper jelly, and even a bottle of homemade blueberry wine.

By the end of the week, we also had a very pretty candle holder that I intend on sitting at my desk after the holidays, once the holiday decorations come down. (I'll have to sneak it off the Boss's desk first, though.) The two attorneys down the street, who get some of our referral business, even brought by a huge basket of gourmet crackers, cookies, chocolate and popcorn. 'Tis the season to eat, I guess.

And that's what we're doing right now. We divided the canned goods and each took them to our respective homes. I got the blueberry wine - cha ching! Everything else is sitting at the office begging me to eat it... and I'm trying. Aside from edible wonders, we've also receive countless Christmas cards wishing us well and thanking the Boss for his efforts in various cases.

We have the best neighbors and clients a law office could ask for. While receiving gifts is always nice, it is the meaning of the gifts and cards that gives me great joy. Every gift or card is the equivalent of someone saying, "You've impacted my life in a positive way, and I appreciate you." I'm not sure anything can beat that.

Now, off I go to finish wrapping those gifts.