Author’s Note: I recently found a file of outtakes from Happy Hour. This one’s a conversation from a bar, discussing career management, and why in all but a few circumstances, “vice” and “routine” are antonyms.
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“I don’t see how you can’t drink every night.” Martin looked perplexed.
“Do it every day and you can’t get drunk anymore.” I stubbed a smoke out in the last of the mussels. “If I have a bunch of these after a couple days off, I’m stung – professional grade loaded.” I held the glass of Stoli in the air, shaking the ice cubes.
“I need a Jim Beam and Coke when I get home.” Martin signaled the bartender. “Have one and you’ll have two. Two and it’s three and–”
“And so it’ll go.”
“The waitress, red hair…” He gave me the elbow. “Serious rack.”
“Push up bra.”
“Let a man dream.”
“You know why they wear black skirts?”
“Slimming. No shit.”
“Look a whole lot different in white.”
“I can suspend disbelief.”
“I wreck. It’s my thing.”
“Four, though… Four’s the line.”
“The line?”
“Never more than four bourbon and Cokes… On a weeknight.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against drinking every night. I go on runs, months at a time. But I try not to.”
“It isn’t the healthiest–”
“That isn’t it.”
“You’re a gym guy.”
“You think that’s about health?” I picked the spent filter up from the plate. “Vanity. That’s what that is.”
“You’re practically hitched.”
“It’s terminal.”
“Monogamy…”
“Vanity.”
“Honest for the shallow… give you that.”
“How are those exclusive?”
“What was the point?”
“Why not drink every night.”
“Why not?”
“Agreed.”
“Well, then that’s settled.”
“Wait — I meant — …I need a Red Bull.”
“And people pay for your advice…”
“It’s simple. You know how if you drink a lot Thursday, you can’t get drunk Friday?”
“I can get drunk Friday. I get drunk Saturday, Sunday–”
“Yeh, but you can’t get really drunk…” I waved at the redhead. “You know, damaged. Buzz gets weaker every day you sauce.”
“Commitment.”
“Commitment?”
“You versus the tolerance.” Martin fired back the last of his drink, an excuse to bring the waitress back again. “Beat it.”
“You never get as ripped like you’d been sober a few days. Push it all you like — you can’t lose your mind.”
“Madness.”
“You’re shitty.”
“Irrelevant.”
“If it’s routine, it’s a job. If it’s a job, it’s not a release. No release, where’s the holiday?”
“Wherever I’m sitting…” His voice trailed into the noise. Martin knew the point, but the ass on another waitress passing was five, six times more important. Always is. I lit another smoke and scanned the bar.
No use in debating the issue. Martin had been an advocate of sustained, daily escape as far back as our college days. Baking was the standard prescription, but in the past few months, as his job had turned to just shy of torment, he added an IV of Beam to the mix.
This made all the difference, of course, because liquor’s a far meaner poison, at least on a consistent daily level. Millions of people smoke pot before, during and after work every day. And if you consider the extent to which it keeps a whole lot of them from drinking, a vice that kills a worker’s next day production, the government should more than legalize it. If “[T]he business of America is business,” and the Republic needs us fixated on dreck sixty, eighty hours a week to keep the rocks rolling up the mountains, Uncle Sam needs to rethink his “Drug War”… Subsidize huge Turkish hookahs for every corporate suite in the country.
No one would work! Our economy’d collapse overnight!
This is what many might be thinking. But that would be undeserved props, because that isn’t thinking at all. See, our economy’s already fucked. The Market’s a gentrified dog track, this housing thing’s crashing like a stone, and the only thing we build here is Debt. Why? Because nobody likes what they do.
It isn’t the stress; it’s the Boredom. Slogging ‘round the cracker factory’s torture. And it’s all near equally vacant. Butcher, baker, credit default swap creator – work in the same trade every day and you’ll soon forget you’re alive.
But what the hell else can we do? If you can’t take that yoke of boredom, some other duller suit will, and that son of bitch’ll lap you. What’s the solution there?
Get out of our heads at the office. Seriously, why the hell not? Half the people there are already on anti-depressants. If we all smoked a lot more pot, there’d be much less employee turnover. When you’re stoned, angst’s an abstract concept, disgust too harsh to consider and stifled ambition too disturbing. You shove them miles out of your head, focus on your fractal screen savers… The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of the Place” – the song you hum every morning in the hall – is traded for “Oye Como Va.” Suddenly work isn’t so bad. You write some stuff, read some stuff, talk about nothing with some people and then they give you a check. You go home, bake some more, watch TV, fall asleep, wake up and do it again.
If only I could have persisted in something like that routine. I’d have probably made managing partner.
“No one would work! Our economy’d collapse overnight!”
Fewer people would work, but that would just create a bigger demand for labor. If you actually wanted to work, it’d become a far more rewarding experience. You’d be better compensated, have more control over picking jobs you want to work on, and management would need to treat you better because they can’t afford to lose you.
Our economy definitely wouldn’t fail, and not because it already has failed. The people who continue to work will be forced to find better ways to get their jobs done. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” More things would become automated, fewer useless TPS reports would be filled out. There wouldn’t be a single file memo written.
There was actually an experiment done at an auto factory, I think Dodge, where they continuously cut the work force in order to get the remaining workers to become more innovative. I think they ultimately reduced it by over half without any loss in productivity.
PL: The 80/20 Rule… 20% of workers do all the real work in any office.
I think I’ve written elsewhere that if we eliminated all the chair-warming jobs in this economy, we’d have 30% unemployment. if on top of that we eliminated all the employees who coast on goodwill or political maneuvering while delivering minimal, if any, value, we’d have 60% unemployment.
I’ve jumped from one job to another — both in pretty depressing, pancake-flat cities in the great Midwest — all in the name of taking the next step to the more prestigious gig only to find that next job is just another skipping track on a fairly dull album. Ganja is great help, no doubt. But I think the reason why you, me and so many others can’t sustain that is that sooner or later the grass, like the bourbons, seems to have less and less lift. You end up in front of a computer screen with an eye buzz, clicking through dozens of news and quazi-news sites and as the buzz fades, you realize you’ve been doing this everyday… forever… and that you can’t return to being sober in this situation nor tolerate it stoned. And, unlike the blue collar jobs I had years ago, the professional world frowns on those who have to head out to an ally or their car every couple hours to reheat their minds. Maybe THC pills could change that. I don’t know, haven’t had the option.
I dug your book big time. And the blog. Keep it coming.
Thank you.
PL” Perhaps. Or perhaps we could stop running a country of bored administrators of nothing watching 401ks and waiting for retirement and shift to a nation of innovators actually creating something again. The key to an American resurgence is re-acquainting young Americans with their entrepreneurial spirit, rather than focusing every dollar on protecting bloated corporate behemoths that deliver dependable quarterly gains to geriatrics. We’ve a concocted status quo that desperately needs to go, but we’ve none of the stomach for the pain that’d bring.
“…eighty hours a week to keep the rocks rolling up the mountains…”
Some day I’ll be able to write like this.
PL: Thanks, but all you need for that one is to read a few Greek fables. You can use bible stories and fables as examples in just about anything.
Nice post. The day-in, day-out aspect of work, any work, is a killer. Compared to most jobs that I have had the chance to observe, being a lawyer is not so bad. The rub, however, is in the repetition. -Chamois
PL: And the money shot’s in the repetition of the rub.
But I digress… Whatever the job, I think it all comes back to that line in Office Space. We are not meant to spend our lives in front of computers, doing the same thing day in, day out, no matter how much we’re paid.
Great piece. We could all use a bit more weed. But choose to put ourselves inside the pills. It makes our trivial existence meaningful. It makes us robots. Pull that lever, push that button. We’re more than happy to oblige. Salvation or damnation, I suppose it makes little difference because I sure as hell can’t tell the difference.
PL: Pills fit the average moron’s infantile value system. Dope is bad because it causes people to question. That’s not a high that fits with the “American narrative,” as its served up to the lowest common denominator who’ll willingly swallows it all. But pills? Pills are fine because your doctor says they’re good.
Simple justifications for incurious, simple minds.
“Butcher, baker, credit default swap creator -”
Brilliant.
Loved the “Oye Como Va” reference – maybe it’s time to dust off my copy of Abraxas.
PL: Check out the Tito Puente version. Tight.
(I’ve been waiting years to use a Tito Puente reference. Thanks.)
Reminds me of an article (can’t find it with two minutes on the Google, but it’s somewhere) where a westerner was traveling through Papua New Guinea and came across a tribe where each individual capable of working for the tribe rotated their jobs every so often. One week fishing, another week weaving baskets etc.
Of course this was nowhere near as efficient as having everyone specialize one job. The westerner told them this, that they could get so much more done. One tribesman replied with something like “why would we want to do that? I wouldn’t like to fish everyday for the rest of my life.”
Simple but true. Specialization is for insects.
Shift to change work lifestyles so work isn’t so inherently shite, or just provide painkillers to ease the process?
PL: You hit the nail on the head. If there’s a difference between American corporate culture and an ant farm, it escapes me… And lord knows I’ve been looking.
As to your question, I think we’re still in the initial throes of a national nervous breakdown that started in 2006. Where it ultimately goes, who knows. But if I can borrow from Twain and Bret Easton Ellis, respectively, “Rumors of [a recovery] are greatly exaggerated”… and no, “This is not an ending.”
It’s going to get worse. A whole lot worse. Read anything Bill Gross from Pimco has been saying (and brush off the allegations he’s biased because he works in bonds) and for the long term meta problems, watch this: http://www.iousathemovie.com.
My problem is, like many people who read this here blog, I get bored the second I start to see the pattern. Even if I don’t have something down 100%, once I see how to get there, I’m done. I’ve only been doing my current job for six months, and I already see how to crack most of it. Sure, if I kept doing it for ten years, I’d be much, much better, but that’s because I’ll have perfected it all. I don’t want to perfect anything; I want to get a basic grasp and move on.
Given all that, picking law as a career was a tragic mistake. There are lots of industries where I could be bouncing around to a new state and new job every 6 months to 2 years and no one would think twice. Not only would that kind of bouncing horrify a potential legal employer, there’s the whole bar thing to fuck things up, too.
Maybe pot is the answer.
PL: Ah, but once you learn three or four different areas and realize the necessity of specialization is a myth, you have accrued the benefit of being able to work for yourself as a high end generalist. For most people who can’t fully escape law, working for yourself is the best second place. And the market is moving to meet you. The trend right now for all but the monster companies and those going through litigation or deals that can break the entire corporation is away from the bigger firms, and even some of the mid-sized outfits, toward smaller shops that can provide real attention and real value. In that, you could learn any area you wanted.
I’ve worked in five allegedly distinct areas. It’s all the same once you learn the baseline rules of dealing and manipulating the levers. Every system involves people and people have a finite number of predictable reactions to certain stimuli and options. Learn to manage those and stay on the right side of the rule book and you can successfully litigate just about anything.
It isn’t brain surgery. I’ve done injury cases and disputes re: derivatives. After a small learning curve to pick up the specifics, it’s all the same game.
Caveat: Deal lawyering is different, of course. There, you have to learn to specialize a bit.
Your stories are often filled with dialogue and booze before they shift to commentary. How? I’ve tried my hand at writing up some stories of travels and adventures over the past couple years. A testament to this waning 22 year vacation that will end with me finding myself in a suit and tie, shaving every morning at 5:30 am, and trying to justify a career on wall st. with its ability to finance my increasingly expensive preferences for whisky and beer. The stories are fun and rambling, but I’m lucky to work a few lines of dialogue into the narrative. Gets way too fuzzy to do any of it justice on paper. It’s a shame though, because dialogue makes the descriptive passages more tangible, and helps the flow of the story.
What do you do to recreate and piece together dialogue days, months or years after the fact?
Weed should be legal, and much more widespread, but its buzz loses its fun in time. Nothing provides a good enough kick for long enough to keep the growing minority of us who think from getting restless while living in a cubicle and producing nothing. You burn out or you get that itch again, and go looking for something else.
PL: It’s a gas/brake thing. I’ve two sides to my brain on this stuff: Creative and Analytical. The Creative does the dialogue that works as the fuel of the piece, moving it forward. The Analytical stops it and delivers a payoff. Works like music – lyrics, lyrics, lyrics, chorus.
Recreate? I use something like Fear and Loathing as a baseline. The dialogue has to be funny, so it’s written from the angle of mining out out the funniest elements of conversations I’ve had with the actors. Also, the funniest aspects of their personalities. I write like I talk, which makes it simple, and the conversation at the bar is one I’ve had a thousand times with Martin. Don’t get hung up on the exactness of the verbiage utilized. Nail the general crux of the conversation and the language of the speaker.
You’re right on weed. Law of diminishing returns inevitably. BUT, it’s a hell of a lot better than pills. As long as I live, I’ll never understand our country’s need to numb itself with pharmaceuticals. I loathed most of the people I worked with in Philly, and I probably could have gone to see a shrink and gotten pills like so many other decent people I knew in the legal profession had done. But that, to me, was insanity. Life’s not supposed to be a fucking candy lane where everything makes you chipper. It’s a survival gig, and if you don’t take the highs with the lows, what’s the fucking point? Where’s the richness of the story? Writing the book has cost me somewhere in the area of a quarter million in lost wages to date and you know what? I’d never do it any other way. The weathering you get with the ups and downs and convulsions one goes through jumping around from practice area to practice area and throwing yourself into industries you know nothing about reward you with a depth of experience you’ll never get merely following The Track to Financial Security.
This isn’t to say, of course, that one can’t do both. You can run on the The Track and quietly be your own person. But it takes diligence in always reminding yourself that your job is Just a Way to Get Money, and Not Your Life. Never forget that. The minute you get caught up in the reindeer games and start viewing your every move as some form of “personal branding,” or thinking the hierarchy you work in is anything but an artificial diversion and mechanism from which to accrue money, You’re Done.
Well, unless you’re lucky enough to love what you do. In which case, there’s a 99.9% chance you don’t work for a corporation, but yourself.
What a great read. I wish I could bake before work, but I am one of those folks who becomes retarded after one hit; I have to save that shit for the evening. And when you refered to Brett Ellis in a comment, I think the quote is ‘This is not an EXIT”. But I haven’t read that book in years, so maybe I’m wrong. Whatever. Have a nice day.
PL: Nice catch. I always fuck up that quote. Either way, people get the point.
As to the retarded thing, practice makes perfect. You sound ambitious and smart. I think with a little persistence, you can get where you need to be.
[...] our favorite PhilaLawyer tells you how to get promoted. [...]
As a callow youth I’d say the prospect of lifelong crap jobs will be with us as long as we (I’m a brit, but US state education isn’t supposed to be much better than ours) have shitty schools.
Brits basically start high school (college over here, uni comes after that) at 16. When we get there we do 6 hours less lessons per week, two or three lessons a day, no uniforms and it’s not compulsory. When you experience a few months of this you realise a few things:
1) You are doing 6 hours less per week and a third of the number of subjects, yet you are learning at a pace that is probably about four or five times faster than secondary school. In addition, you are keeping up with this pace.
2) When school is stripped of the future heroin dealers, chavs, mouth breathers and assorted cunts, it stops being so painful.Likewise, when the teachers are actually competent and there to mentor you instead of keep you in line, you start to really enjoy your subjects. Add the lack of uniforms and actual freedom and you actually feel like getting up in the morning.
3) You have to specialise stupidly early. By the start of year 2 you’ll have chosen whatever course you plan on doing at university (we have to pick from the start, we don’t just pick and choose classes); and that will already be restricted based on which four subjects you picked. If you picked artsy subjects you’re limited to the arts/social sciences at uni and if you picked sciences you’re limited to sciences.
People who might have been quite good at maths, or sciences, or english never found out because the pace was slow as frozen treacle, the teachers were terrible and the schools were utterly miserable places to be. Most intelligent people had one or two good subjects and the rest borderline. These people might have been chemists and engineers ended up a bunch of history/english/sociology students who end up innovating new legal arguments instead of epic techs. At the very least more people would have the tools to learn and do more. Phila, you’ve bemoaned the lack of public knowledge about economics and the like but how is someone going to get a decent grip of econ if they stopped learning mathematics at sixteen, and lost interest at thirteen?
It’s vaguely economic as well. You don’t get an improvement in living standards (that isn’t part of a ponzi scheme anyway) without improving productivity, and you don’t get improved productivity without technological growth, and if your school kids get into the world without any skills to produce technological growth, you don’t grow. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but raising taxes on everyone so you can afford decent schools might end up paying dividends.
PL: Never going to happen. I think we go in the Randian direction instead. We’re getting more bodies at the same time we’re getting less $$$ for govt involvement in societal adjustment. More of a kill or be killed future is what I see.
“We are not meant to spend our lives in front of computers, doing the same thing day in, day out, no matter how much we’re paid.”
I can’t believe I told those fudgepackers I liked Michael Bolton’s music!
The reason this whole thing is fucked is because the lowest among us are the gold standard for labor hires. The students with no lives but schoolwork that turn into the non-equity/non-executive employees that get in early and stay late an extra hour or three on each end of 9-5 everyday (likely because their lives are miserable, if they even have one). These people have redefined normal for the workplace. It’s become unbearable.
What I’ve noticed too: with all of the efficiencies (read: email) in white collar welfare work and administration, nearly all of my busy work is coming from older employees at my clients. Young people will ask for a lot of shit at first as I “teach” them the business in the beginning. The older people continue to hound the shit out of me and are helpless no matter what is done for them. My theory is it’s a function of tasks getting done so much quicker that they are constantly looking for busywork to fill their day and be “productive” while the younger workers surf the web until their older bosses’ next “crisis” comes up.
That’s what contributes to the Boredom: older bosses and clients crying wolf all of the time while their young labor pool solves the problem in half the time compared to a decade ago and the boss/client none the wiser when 30 of the 60 minutes waiting for their request was spent on an employee’s escape on the same computer the work was done on.
PL: Fire all the Luddites and we would be 30% more efficient overnight. Problem is, those older folks have the insights the kids don’t, and the ability to talk to all the other older folks who run the vendors, other divisions, etc.
I’ve worked in soul crushing cog factories. You leave, they’ll pick up some other person to replace you. The ones who excel are the vacant followers. They believe the successories and the corporate cheerleading bullshit. The big online brokerage company I worked for was that way. Most things corporate are that way.
Now I’ve had a few jobs where I was allowed a high degree of independence, and they weren’t looking for results in numbers. The pay wasn’t stellar and the hours sucked, but I didn’t mind going to work. I would get somewhat bored, but as long as I wasn’t constantly micromanaged, and you have a little music it’s pretty nice.
Best job was when I ran a security company. I had to drive from account to account, mark so much time, make a certain number of stops, and just keep an eye on stuff. I was paid to read books, go home for dinner, bang the wife, watch movies, stop off at the old fraternity hangout and have a few beers, and I got to work with one of my best friends. Unfortunately the checks were late if not occasionally bad, and I had to supervise a lot of retards that the boss sourced from the local gym.
Point? It all comes down to a decision of how much money do you really need to be happy.
PL: I don’t comment when I agree. Well said.
I have this running theory going that work behavior is largely a function of aptitude versus attitude. The less aptitude one has the more ‘tude one has to develop to compensate because who’s going to have the balls to call bullshit on someone with that kind of “passion”. Plus morons usually don’t know they’re morons so the ‘tude routine comes off pretty sincere. I remember being a fresh fish in the cube farm and meeting these sorts of bozos and it’s weird because you know something isn’t quite right but you can’t put your finger on it. While the bullshit alarm is sounding you’re working under the assumption that the director/VP/whatever of whatever couldn’t possibly be an Olympic caliber dipshit. WRONG, WRONG, and WRONG. In my experience it runs about a 50-50 dipshit ratio.
Funny thing is it doesn’t even have to be a bitchy, hyper-aggressive ‘tude either, pretty much any over the top ‘tude works. I scratch my head daily at work because I’m pretty sure there’s a company wide panic contest going on and I didn’t get the memo. If you’re not in a total state of full on “sky is falling” panic day in and day out well you obviously don’t get it and aren’t committed to the mission. Really? Was Skully or whatever the hell his name is “uncommitted” when he landed a wide body jet in the Hudson and made sure (twice no less) that every passenger was off the plane because he didn’t shit himself and cry like a little girl in the process?
It’s all so ridiculous I’m not sure how any mildly intelligent person makes it without regular and total intoxication. Can there not be an intelligent Moron in Utah?
PL: I’ll dispense with the Mormon thing first. Do any research on the religion and you will find that Joseph Smith was a con artist. That is fact. His religion was one of many created during a time of national fixations with the Apocalypse (sound familiar?). Around the same time, a drunken Irish ex-priest came up with the Rapture and many Jim Jones-like cults developed around the country. A nice social network and culture has sprung up around Smith’s creation (I have no issue with Mormons and like very much the ones I know), but we should be vigilant to never forget the history of the thing.
As to the attitude/aptitude thing, agreed. I’ve yet to meet a person of immense ego and bluster who wasn’t masking enormous insecurities. The lawyers who’ve scared me the most were never the loud or crass ones. It was always the direct ones. The guys who sent three sentence letters and said, “I’m not going to argue now… We’ll let the court decide at trial” during those silly arguments lawyers sometimes have on the phone were always the sharpest, nastiest bastards. The guy telling you he was going to kill you was always, to a man, an idiot.
While reading your bar conversation I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir and Estragon sitting on two stools going back and forth. Without getting too abstract, I think your description fit’s Beckett’s classic to a T. The random conversations that happen while waiting for something else to happen, but no one knows when or if that “something else” will ever happen. Some lawyers call that working towards partnership.
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As for the end of your entry….it made me think of the Dilbert job I took to kill some time. I never thought it could be that bad. The boredom, the monotony, the mindless drivel that passes for conversation. I can’t imagine how people do that every day, but I think if we look closer…they are simply tuning out, which is the ultimate sign of giving up, because they can’t even muster leaving to do nothing.
PL: That’s a large part of why I wrote. I don’t give a fuck how ridiculous and childish it sounds, but I don’t ever want to go numb from the stress of an oppressive job the way so many people do. There’s more than enough vice to murder those sensory capacities, in a much more amusing and enlightening manner.