Notes from the Breadline: Happy
Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
After months of ceaseless rain, August descends languidly. As it wraps the city in its sweaty fist, the prevailing complaint of New Yorkers shifts seamlessly from “When will the sun come out?” to “I’m hot!” Tourists wrinkle their noses at the smell of ripening garbage on Broome Street, and my super takes up a shirtless vigil on the stoop outside our building. At night, the tables outside of neighborhood cafes fill with wilted hipsters, their carefully disheveled hair drooping damply.
“It’s 300 degrees outside,” my friend Bo announces one day on the phone. I am lying on the floor, watching the ceiling fan turn and thinking about the movie Casablanca, in which people managed to maintain their dignity despite heat and oppressive sartorial conventions. “It’s not so bad,” I say absently, watching the cat, who is attempting to drink out of his water dish without standing up. After a moment, he gives up and flops listlessly onto his side.
“Easy for you to say!” Bo snorts. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to dress up in a suit in 300-degree weather.”
I sit up, covered in cat hair, which has adhered itself to my sweaty clothes. I am like a human ice cream cone, I think, topped with particularly unappetizing sprinkles. It occurs to me that I have heard the sentiment that Bo is expressing - the assumption that I am unable to relate to the lives of working folk - several times since this heat wave started.
“Hmphf,” I say indignantly. “I remember exactly what it’s like to wear a suit to work when it’s 300 degrees out. Just because I’m not working right now, it doesn’t mean I can’t relate.”
Despite my protestations, however, I am secretly delighted. I have, I realize, discovered the silver lining in this storm cloud: I may be jobless and increasingly broke, but let’s face it — here in the breadline, every day is casual Friday.
I decide to pay a visit to Lat (who has been busily posting pictures of his sweaty visage on Facebook). I also suspect that his office is cooler than my apartment. At the very least, I can count on a chilly reception from the Fashionista staff, who regard my inelegance with mortified pity.
I arrive to find Lat stalking crabbily around the office with a watering can, looking harried. “What’s the matter?” I ask, flopping into a chair.
“Ugh,” Lat says irritably. “Elie went on vacation and left me to take care of his donut plant.” He pulls out a pair of pruning shears and begins to trim donut holes from its drooping branches. “I have a lot to do, and I’m really not in the mood to garden.”
“What can I do to help?” I ask, filling a cup from the burbling coffee fountain.
Lat pauses, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Well,” he says, “funny you should ask. I think I want you to give our readers some advice.” He rifles through a pile of papers, which spills over the edge of his desk and cascades onto the floor. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Paper avalanche.” I nod knowingly.
After a few minutes of digging, he pulls out an article from the New York Times, entitled “The Search - Accentuating the Positive After a Layoff.”
“After a layoff,” it begins, “your self-esteem and personal relationships may take a hit. Your bank account and quality of life may both spiral downward. You may not even be sure you can pay your mortgage or rent. And now you’re supposed to go out and convince employers that you’d be a great hire?” Notwithstanding its cheery title, the article goes on to discuss the “despair, hopelessness, depression, and anger” that plague job-seekers during prolonged bouts of unemployment.
“I don’t get it,” I say, confused. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Well, Roxana,” he says, sounding pleased, “I thought you could give our readers a few tips for staying positive while lingering, jobless and forgotten, in the breadline!” He looks at me triumphantly.
“Me?” I say incredulously. “Me? I can’t even be counted on to find my own tadasana.”
Lat narrows his eyes menacingly. “Look,” he says bluntly, “you seem pretty chipper at the moment, with your ponytail and your … your … flip-flops.” He looks at my feet accusatorily. “Between your own experiences and the advice people have given you, you must know something about how to keep your spirits up.” When I don’t answer, he snatches the coffee cup out of my hand. “Get cracking, sister,” he says sternly. “or you can go home and drink Crystal Light.” I cower, aware that he is still holding the pruning shears. “Five tips, Roxana,” he says. “You can do it!”
As I make my way home, thinking about the task at hand, I realize that the difficult part of my assignment is not coming up with five tips; on the contrary, the hard part will be narrowing the wealth of my received wisdom and personal experiences down to a mere five items. Ha! I tell myself. I’m being positive already!
1. Find Your Giovanna: Unemployment has many dark hours, in which you may feel like a miner, trapped and forgotten after the mine collapse: you are alone, unsure how to find your way out, and no one is looking for you. In these moments, it is easy to give in to isolation, if only to spare your friends and family from an experience that feels too unpleasant to share. This is precisely why you need a Giovanna - a friend with whom to share your day-to-day travails.
While you will, undoubtedly, have friends who check in on your progress occasionally, it is crucial to confide in someone regularly. Why, you ask? Because, honestly, most of us can’t handle talking about unemployment all the time, and the thought of bringing friends up to date can be exhausting enough to act as a strong disincentive. You need a friend who is generally aware of your progress, so that you don’t have to provide backstory every time you need to talk. Trust me: you need to make it as easy as possible to reach out. Just recently, I called Giovanna after a particularly stinging rejection, and within two minutes found myself sobbing about my dashed hopes. Not having to explain the events leading up to my tearful call: priceless. (P.S. Get your own Giovanna. Mine’s busy.)
2. Be Like a Rolling Stone: No, friends: I am not suggesting that you should be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown; neither do I mean to imply that you should embrace tight pants and heroin. I mean that you should keep moving, no matter how blue you are or how pointless it feels. Whether you run, bike, swim, or play badminton with friends, staying active will help you stave off insanity like nothing else. There will be many days when your job search leads you nowhere, and your best efforts fail to yield results. Even on these days - or especially on these days - you can still pride yourself on accomplishing something if you make it to the gym, or some facsimile thereof.
3. Help! You have time on your hands; make yourself useful to people who don’t. Since arriving in the breadline, I have tried to do for others what work did not previously allow me to do. Although I can’t claim to have done anything heroic, I have (for example) driven friends to the airport, done a fair amount of dog-sitting, house-watching, and errand-running, and helped several people move. Remember that working full time makes us busy and being busy makes us selfish, if only by necessity. Use this (relatively) unencumbered time to repay the many small kindnesses that have been (and will be) afforded to you. Just try to keep in mind, as you do, the importance of knowing how to give with an open hand. Specifically, time is a luxury you now have; do whatever it is you do for the pure sake of doing it - because you can — and expect nothing in return. The satisfaction of making someone else’s life easier, even in small, temporary ways, will make you happy. I promise.
4. Swallow Your Pride, But Keep Your Boundaries: We’ve talked about the importance of being open about your employment situation (or lack thereof), but it bears repeating, especially as weeks turn into months in the breadline. You’re bound to meet new people, and, sooner or later (though usually sooner), new people say “So, what do you do?” If you let people know you’re unemployed, you will probably save yourself from a concentric round of questions about where you work and what kind of law you practice. Having said as much, announcing that you’re out of work can open the floodgates: friends and strangers alike have, at times, bombarded me with oddly aggressive questions about my financial state, my job search, and my career aspirations, complete with unsolicited advice and free-flowin’ judgments. It’s okay to say “I don’t really want to talk about it right now,” or “I don’t actually know when I’ll find another job,” or, if all else fails, to look off into the distance and pull the old, “Is that an extremely rare black-faced spoonbill?” It will provide you with the momentary distraction you need to wriggle away from conversational discomfort.
5. Easy Does It: Ah, if I had a dollar for every time I berated myself for my unemployment-related failures … work would be rendered superfluous. I didn’t spend the last six months teaching myself Arabic, figuring out how to change my transmission fluid, or training for a marathon. I spent money when I swore I wouldn’t. I haven’t been to all the museums I never had time to visit. My library books are overdue.
Many friends have reminded me that unemployment is, of course, not an unplanned vacation, and its circumstances are not necessarily conducive to crossing things off your “To Do” list or undertaking a rigorous course of self-improvement. As Elie told me many months ago, no one thinks that they will be unemployed for three months, or six months, or longer; you live day to day, certain that it will soon be behind you. Most people don’t organize their stint in the breadline around long-term plans, based on a vague notion of what they could accomplish if they had six months in which to do it.
So, friends, I will pass the collective wisdom of my friends and acquaintances on to you. Go easy on yourself. Do as much as you can, but keep in mind that, when ambient stress is your constant companion, you may not have the mental capacity to face, or take on, challenges the way you otherwise might. Enjoy the occasional indulgence, like a pedicure or a cup of coffee from Starbucks; spend as much time as you can with people who make you laugh; and, every once in a while, hunker down and watch bad TV.
Someday, we’ll wake up, startled to find Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, Professor Marvel, Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory standing beside our beds, smiling. Auntie Em will say, “There, there, lie quiet now. You just had a bad dream.’ “No,” you’ll insist, “it wasn’t a dream — it was a place. They called it ‘the breadline,’ and you — and you — and you — and you were there.”
Readers: What advice or tips would you offer to those of us in the breadline?
___________________________________________________________________________
Roxana St. Thomas is a laid-off lawyer living in New York. You can reach her by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook. And check out the Notes from the Breadline t-shirt store here.
(104) Comments
Comments
First the Iowa crap and now another big fat old turd. Post something relevant on this blog--their are plenty of offer rate / OCI stories out there---report them.
PODIUM!
First the Iowa crap and now another big fat old turd. Post something relevant on this blog--there are plenty of offer rate / OCI stories out there---report them.
This sucks worse than having to read about Iowa and how fat Mystal is.
honestly, can this blog get any worse?
5th - speaking of...I'll take a fifth of scotch please.
Christ, I actually get first on a post (albeit a piece of shit Roxanna one) and I fuck it up with a typo. Maybe I should find suicidal laid off Latham first year and fix nature's obvious mistake.
-1&3
Pure verbal diarrhea, in electronic form.
lets replace this boring hack with law 4 losers
this is so miserable. i pray that the unemployment rate goes down just so this woman gets employed and it can stop clogging my RSS.
accusatorily? really?
accusatorily? really?
Comment removed by moderator.
lame.
Horrible!
Out with the Roxana, in with the Law4Losers!
Horrible!
Out with the Roxana, in with the Law4Losers!
Is Roxana even trying to find work any more? Doesn't sound like it, so why waste our time?
Law4Losers commenters = Marinheads 2k9. Judging by how well that situation worked out, maybe we should listen this time around.
I thought this was a pretty thoughtful and helpful post. Thanks, anonymous unemployed lady!
Roxana tries hard but her writing just doesn't work. Law4Losers, however, is an artist.
I remember when this site used to be fun and I would look forward to reading it.
5 - It did - with your whiny-ass post. You could always not read it.
Please get Law Is 4 Losers guy/gal as a regular. It would be a major improvement.
Let me get this straight: Roxana whines and bitches for months on end in her pathetic columns, and now she's trying to give advice to everyone on how to stay positive?
EPIC FAIL.
the first paragraph is well written. i surprised my self by enjoying it.
Lawisforlosers wins. Time for Roxana to be fired again.
I have to horticultural knowledge but I'm thinking the donut plant thing has to be an inside joke, and bait to the body type bigots who frequent these pages.
If you like Law Is 4 Losers, just check out his blog directly:
http://bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com/
You ARE allowed to read things that don't appear on ATL.
Thanks for all of the suggestions about Law 4 Losers, but all of them are coming from the same IP address. Perhaps if other readers wanted Law 4 Losers, we'd consider adding it as a regular feature.
~Karen the Intern
Good post, Roxana.
Ignore the haters. I'm not sure why they pile on you like this. If they don't want to read your column, they don't have to read it.
30 comments and nothing about Elie's donut plant?
"Ugh," Lat says irritably. "Elie went on vacation and left me to take care of his donut plant." He pulls out a pair of pruning shears and begins to trim donut holes from its drooping branches. "I have a lot to do, and I'm really not in the mood to garden."
Maybe it was too easy?
nice one about Elie's donut plant
Just, no.
lol @ Lat "stalking crabbily around" + the donut plant.
Karen the Intern-
Can you please comment on the veracity of Roxana's claim that Elie has a donut tree in the office? Journalistic integrity depends on this.
TIA
Wow, "Karen the Intern" of post 28 who has access to the IP addresses makes me wonder just how many posts are actually legit and how many are manufactured or spun by the good folks at ATL . . .
Roxanna, try working a week as a craigslist hooker, then write a column telling us about your experiences. That might actually not suck.
I just can't read the Roxanna posts. The introduction totallly bores me, and after the jump when I realize how much she has actually written, I just have to stop. I just can't inflict that much pain on myself.
and she [Karen the Intern] also makes me slightly uneasy about the monitoring or influencing of posts here. . .
-35
She forgot one:
6) Wallow in self-pity.
@ 28 -- I vote for L4L getting a running column
Question: Has Roxanna or that Law 4 Losers douche considered looking for work outside of NYC. I know this may sound shocking to self-entitled pricks, but there are legal markets out there other than NYC, DC, Chicago, and LA.
I'll give you an example. About two years ago, just as the economy was in the early stages of tanking, a friend of mine was having trouble finding work, any work, in the NYC legal market. So he started applying for jobs in other markets, particularly in mid-size markets in the Southwest. He found a great job and is now making north of 100K doing med malpractice litigation in a mid-size southwestern city.
In other words, he desire to be a lawyer trumped his desire to be a big city NYC lawyer. And it worked.
Karen the Intern doesn't really work at ATL dumbasses
Nice work Roxanna, I enjoyed it. There's a weird contingency reading your posts just to hate on you. But....they're reading it and looking forward to it along with those of us that like it. You're fucking with them without them even knowing it.....THAT'S priceless
OK, the joke about Elie's donut plant wasn't bad, but really, if it only gave donut holes Elie would realistically need a whole greenhouse full of them in order to meet his needs.
43 here--
In case I wasn't clear, I'm saying Elie's a big guy.
boobs.
boobs.
41, obviously it's more "prestigious" to be an unemployed lawyer in NYC than to be a real lawyer in a smaller city. Sex and the City wasn't set in Phoenix, was it now?
43 +44 here--
I mean, fuck, just look at the pictures of him.
Should have the dude from bigdebtsmalllaw blog take over this post. What happened to the stories? Now every post of yours starts out with a "visit to lat's office" and then some stupid assignment that is boring. Or you waste an entire post with some lame poetry. We don't need advice from you. I was just interested in your stories about being laid off and the job search, and now its like a crappy advice column from someone who doesn't take her own advice.
Please write something interesting!!
Can someone please knock Roxana off of her soapbox?
Thanks.
Karen the intern:
Can you check my IP address and confirm to everybody how prestigious I am?
Thank you,
Federal Appellate Court Stud
Here is my advice for the unemployed...
1.) Go to a store.. any store.. even gas stations carry this product these days.
2.) Buy a copy of "World of Warcraft" with all the expansions.
3.) Crawl out of your cave after a year and see if the economy still sucks.. its a win/win.. either you can get a job or play more warcraft.
Also, you'll ignore all your needs... friends, family, food, water, sleep, dignity, values.. you'll save money this way by ignoring yoru needs.. good times....
bonus points : if you have a lot saved up.. find a decent dealer and partake in a few hits before those raids commence. This can get expensive.. but after this you won't even want to work again. hahaaha
Enjoy!
My eyes....the goggles do nothing!
Roxana is fucking horrible. Lat, please get rid of her and give that guy who writes the contract attorney blog a job.
could Karen the Intern let us know when something interesting is posted on ATL today?
Seriously, get a job already. This is ridiculous.
Seriously, get a job already. This is ridiculous.
I don't want to hear anthing more from Roxana until she runs out of unemployment benefits, gets evicted, and becomes a crack whore. Then I might be interested in reading about her.
"Notes from the breadline" is a terrible feature and is constantly getting worse. Time for new blood.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/51/Fonzie_jumps_the_shark.PNG
As an unemployed 2009 JD (T1) who just took a few bar exams, I enjoyed this post. It was well-written and it cheered me up. It is hard not to feel like the odds are against finding a job in the legal industry right now.
How bad has this gotten? I can't read through an entire one since that whole poem thing, and even then I went a few too far.
This bitch needs to go get a job at Starbucks for a while...stop leaching off the system and become productive again.
That really made no sense whatsoever.
Lat - when are you going to admit that YOU are Roxana?
This single perspective on unemployment has gotten a bit stale.
Maybe this spot could rotated to a number of different unemployed attorneys, who each might have something new to say. I'm interested in what people are going through out there, but I think I now know as much as I ever need to know about what's happening to this one person who has a friend named giovanna.
This is the only reason I read ATL lately.... I live for this column!
Roxanna needs to get off of her ass and do some pro bono work. I wonder what an interviewer is going to think when they ask her what she has been doing in the year since she was fired and she says something like, "you know, blogging, whining about my cat's barf," etc...
She should be volunteering somewhere- she'll get some experience running things on her own (a skill she whines about not having when she considers and rejects solo practice every other week), and she might even meet someone who is hiring.
More and more she is seeming like an overentitled whiny brat.
I don't get it. You're gonna teach us how to be happy being a loser?
I read the whole thing. I thought that was really good. It sounded much more inspired than usual and I honestly thought it was way better than any other "advice column" type writing that I have ever read.
It really is a stark contrast: the L4L post made me--for the first time--print out a passage found on this blog and share it with my colleagues here. Not to mention laugh out loud multiple times.
It's written with infinitely more vigor than "Roxana's" vapidly narcissistic drivel. I immediately thought that L4L's presence would finally shame Roxana into resignation. (Every time her column appears, I have a brief moment of joy when I misread "latest installment" as "LAST installment".)
But, no! Here she comes, with the most tepid, irrelevant, and booooooooooooooooring post to date.
Really, Roxana (and Lat): I don't think there's some "silent majority" of readers here who enjoy your dreck. They all hate it--like they say in the comments.
I was reading this in a crowded place on my blackberry and I started shaking and laughing at Elie's donut tree & Lat having to tend it. The whole post was worthwhile for that image.
Agree with the haters. A column that lacks any sense of direction. It's gotten so bad that Roxanna is writing about going to talk to Lat about having no sense of direction for the column. This is truly a case of beating a dead horse.
Great post, Roxana. These mean people need to get a life. I very much enjoyed reading this.
If there are a lot of hits for this post, it's because people are looking at the comments or posting witty remarks like 73=Roxana.
Hmm, this is getting better now that Roxanna seems a bit more humbled now. Not humbled enough to take a non-legal job, but I assume that'll coincide with the exhaustion of unemployment benefits, and this will really get good.
I'm willing to bet that if you check the IP addresses for each of the short pithy comments like "very helpful", "great post" and "thoughtful" you'll find they all come from the same person who might a=lso happen to be an unemployed woman named Roxana.
70, if you used "dreck" about five more times in your paragraph I would have confused you with L4L. So are you L4L?
Has Roxana tried doing some pro bono work at all? I know it doesn't pay, but it's better experience to do SOMETHING than just sit at home and look at the ceiling fan. I think Lat should send Roxana on a pro bono assignment and then she can give us feedback on that experience.
LOL @ Lat tending Elie's donut plant & Facebook shoutouts.
( . )( . )
boobs
This column wouldn't be so bad if it was about the process of finding a job after getting laid off and the trials and tribulations of doing so.
Get rid of Roxanna and hire someone who has already found another job and they can write a weekly retrospective of what it was like.
Not only would it be more interesting, we might learn a thing or two.
This is nothing but a waste of space.
24 FTW
It seems like lately these columns all revolve around Roxanne meeting with Lat, and Lat telling her what to write about.
If Roxanne isn't creative enough to come up with column ideas, what exactly is she adding to this site? the first few installments were goodf, but the well has run dry.
Wah, haters. I liked this so much I emailed it to all my unemployed friends.
77- No, but I'm flattered by your insinuation, actually.
--70
Roxanna--
10 years ago, I became unemployed. During that period, I interacted with a great many people who basically broke down into three categories.
Category 1 consisted of people who were terrified by the possibility of unemployment. These folks did not want to even acknowledge the possibility that unemployment could happen. This meant that they simply did not wish to have any interaction with an unemployed person. At first, I was offended by this attitude, but I eventually acknowledged that they did not wish to acknowledge the possibility that they might be unemployed themselves at some point in their life.
Category 2 individuals consisted of persons who denied unemployment by embarking on a policy of boundless optimism. After awhile, I became aware that these individuals were closely related to category 1 individuals in the sense that they denied the possibility of unemployment by employing utterly unrealistic optimism, instead of simply avoiding or pushing aside the unemployed person.
Category 3 individuals were rare, but ultimately proved to provide the springboard for new employment. These individuals simply accepted the fact that I was unemployed. They did not engage in judging my life or even providing sopping sympathy, and they certainly did not try to avoid my presence or provide unrealistic optimism. Whenever possible they would provide a job lead or an idea, but mostly they just accepted the fact that I was unemployed, and all the difficulties that flow from that status.
I found category 3 individuals by simply reconnecting with individuals that I lost contact with over a period of 20 and who were people I simply respected and liked. At the time, I was frantically searching for new work, but that was not working. In desperation, I decided to pause from my search and simply do something for myself. One aspect of doing something for myself was reconnecting with people I cared about, not trying to connect with myself with people who might be able to do something for me.
One of those category 3 individuals inadvertently provided me with a lead that eventually led to a new job.
I have been reading your articles and the comments posted in response to your articles. Personally, I think that you are performing a public service because I can attest that being unemployed is a very lonely place indeed, and trying to appear optimistic and put on a positive face simply to make others feel better is a major strain.
I also believe that there appears to me to be a number of category 1 and category 2 individuals posting comments in response to your articles.
I can only say, as a person in my late 50s, that sooner or later everyone will encounter a situation like unemployment, a death in the family, or life threatening illness, or some event which you will not be able to resolve through sheer effort or intelligence. When that happens, look for category 3 people.
Best of luck to you.
Tip #6 for laid-off attorneys: If you are unable to resist the urge to write an overlong ATL column every week disgorging the mundane details of your post-layoff existence, and if you lack the sense to recognize when you're flogging a dead horse, at least make something up so you don't give away the facts that (1) you don't have anything substantive and/or interesting to report, and (2) you have no real insight into the post-layoff existence other than that it kinda sucks.
Or here's an idea for your next post: talk about how laid-off junior and mid-level Biglaw associates from top law schools should abandon all hope of returning to the law because (1) they lack the skills to conduct a proper job search because they never had to, (2) their high salary expectations coupled with their lack of real legal skills makes them unemployable, so by the time their jobs exist again, they'll go to laterals from smaller firms who spent their first 2-3 years of practice doing real legal work, not just reviewing documents.
But alternatively, I'm sure we'd all enjoy another post about how your yoga is going...
Remember: Shock, Anger, Denial, Acceptance. Seems like Roxana is in the denial or acceptance phase. Must overcome. Get creative and generate some real job-hunting strategies.
For me, the volunteering I did in law school is the network that is getting me a job today. No time like the present to get off your duff and network, network, network, even if that means showing off your skills in a (gasp!) unpaid position or volunteer role. Pick an organization (school, charity, trade association, museum, park, historic site, local government, your relevant alumni/religious/heritage/culture associations) where you'll meet the people you want to meet. (Rich parents of kids at a private school? Entrepreneurs launching small businesses? Patrons of an environmental/historic/arts organization? Professors? Employees of your dream clients?) This is your free infomercial. Show off what you can do, and you'll meet someone who knows someone. Lead with a great personality, and you'll be noticed and have a great conversation opener. No one wants to hire a whiner. This is America, people!
Some of y'all should run for elected office. Start as small as you can and work your way up. Barack' Obama didn't become POTUS by staying in biglaw forever.
The number one secret: Every morning, get up early, get dressed (hair and makeup included, ladies), just like you are headed off to a summertime casual Friday; no drycleaning bills, please) and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. Never know who you will meet. They are not in your house, not on TV, not online. Go do something and meet someone. Have coffee with a former professor. Repay a lunch date with someone who treated you when you were a summer associate. Go to the library. Use your laptop on the courthouse stairs.
Worst case scenario: no job lead that day, but you could make a friend or get a date.
Keep up the good work - these notes keep me positive.
roxanna, i look forward to your columns and i appreciate this one, too. thanks.
Roxie, take a Ludens.
89 and 90 see 76.
Mafia Wars on Facebook is pretty good for networking, but it's hard to beat Castle Age for total fantasy head cases . . .
Id say the Roxana well has definitely dried up. Time to put that cow out to pasture.
67, Pro bono work is part of what created this legal recession.
It's clear from the increasing absurdity of this series that this column is no longer intended as an honest reflection on the experience of being laid off by BigLaw, but is instead a series of fictional challenges where the writer earns points (donut holes?) for somehow managing to make dozens of people read it, hate it, and then post how they hated it and how it was a waste of their time. The "hater" posters not only don't get the joke, they are the joke (although I generally agree with the "drivel" characterizations of late). Apparently this week the writer was awarded bonus points for adverbs. These were just in the intro narrative: languidly seamlessly carefully damply absently listlessly indignantly secretly increasingly busily crabbily irritably thoughtfully knowingly triumphantly incredulously menacingly bluntly accusatorily occasionally. Geez.
Well done, Roxanna.
Roxana; I'm from the UK, currently job-hunting. It sucks to be constantly rejected, but it's good to know there are other people out there going through the same thing. That's especially true for other people in the legal industry, since most of us seem to be gluttons for punishment where work is concerned!
I enjoy your posts and I think the criticism you have received above is unfair. I don't want to be constantly told to feel jolly about being stuck in this situation, and I appreciate the candid account of your experience you have presented so far.
this was actually pretty good, Lat.
too long. did not read
i love these notes. thank you!
The author has a great sense of humor. Thx.
Reality is, whether some want to admit it or not, a lot of VERY good attorneys from top firms have been laid off.
To the haters I would say, watch your back. IF you are employed--as you claim to be-- better get back to work and start billing hours instead of reading ATL.
You may be next in line for a layoff...and there are some very good people waiting to take your place. Beware the reaper.
LOL. I love the reference to Elie's "donut plant."