And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here? – Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

That line played in my head a lot during my tour of the legal industry in Philadelphia. But never with more of a hook, or greater gravity, than during an odd moment where, for reasons I can’t explain, I found myself observing a local Trial Lawyer’s gala. In a situation like that, all I could do was shake my head, sip my drink and wonder, Seriously… How in the fuck did I get here?

For the past week of the promotion of the new Happy Hour is for Amateurs paperback, we’ve beaten up on the billable hour lawyers. Made fun of their out sized egos and myriad social dysfunctions, attacked their 18th century billing model… But that’s only half the story. This excerpt from the book covers their counterparts – the guys who file the lawsuits, otherwise known as “Plaintiffs” lawyers. I’d give you a little more but that might ruin the picture. Better to let the description do the talking. See if I haven’t nailed the funnier angles of the tribe:

A Crowd for Radio

“Scratch any cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” Carlin nailed that one on the head. But he should have taken it further. Scratch the pious and you’ll find a deviant. Scratch the flirty and you’ll find a lousy lay. The teetotaler and you’ll find a closeted solvent sniffer, the liberal and you’ll find a tax cheat… The list goes on forever, but it all comes down to this point: The Surface is just the surface, and no, it’s not Reality.

We’ve all got a closet full of masks, and nothing reminds you of that like sitting in a stodgy club – one of those musty, Republican joints… a place Alex P. Keaton would have loved, or you could imagine Tucker Carlson holding court – admiring The Polite around you and wondering as you sip your whiskey, “Are these people thinking what I’m thinking? …What they all might look like naked? How the couplings might shake out if the place were to erupt in an orgy like something out of Eyes Wide Shut?”

The blue haired geriatric woman with the moustache would probably go for the guy in the bow tie – the one with the Mormon haircut. But he’s deeply closeted. He’d try for the maitre’d. The cougar in the corner’d want the server – the skinny foreign kid. And she’d want everyone to watch. The jowly couple just off the kitchen? They’d go at each other on the table. And the only question there is what condiments they’d add into the act. He’s obviously a cocktail sauce guy, but from the way she’s lathering those rolls, if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear, the woman is all about the butter.* Perhaps they’ll meet in the middle… use that gravy boat of blue cheese dressing?

It’s enough to tease a weak gag reflex.

You’d like to think to think the whole room’s thinking that. And maybe the sick bastards are. Running lurid movies in their heads, all equally bored to tears. But they’d never admit it. And neither will you. You’ll just sit there and smile and drink – another brushed-cut, buttoned-down Average Well-Mannered Male. “Fresh pepper for iceberg salad?” “Yes, thank you.”

But beware of the physics in these places. Every action spurs a reaction, and the stiffer the setting you’re in, the more stiff drinks you’ll down. This slice of Happy Hour Is for Amateurs is about an evening at one of the dustier, white-bread dinner clubs in Philadelphia – the start of a brutal bender that eventually lead to one my greater professional embarrassments:

Lit Up in Stiff City
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* Insert your own Last Tango in Paris joke here.

I’ve got two things today. The first is a slice of Happy Hour is for Amateurs dealing with the bane of every associate’s existence, and every client’s pocketbook – billable hours. If you know anything about the legal profession, you’ve heard how they’re routinely inflated. Heard of the studies showing that 20, 30% of lawyers pad their time. You might have read an article I did with the guys at Bitterlawyer.com outlining the more subtle forms of it.

No need to rehash that here. We all know how the recent “law-firms-as-unit-salesman” model has compelled all sorts of fraud. This piece addresses a different issue – a more finite, amusing one… How a lawyer allegedly billing 2400 hours a year – and yes, that’s exceedingly common – could achieve such an amazing feat:

2400 Hours

The second thing I have is a review of the book, one that just appeared last night. “Why cite this?” you might be thinking. There’s a simple reason for that. When I started writing the book, some people were critical of the approach taken. Said you couldn’t vein a serious message through three hundred pages of obnoxious humor. Said we either had to aim for the frat boys who read one book a year, or the serious readers who’d only respond to a conveniently redemptive and re-affirming message, but that doing both was doom. My editors and I disagreed. Both are offensive conceits, built on awful stereotypes. The “frat boys” read a lot more than you think, and the truly “serious” book readers – those who read not to have their assumptions reinforced, but challenged – consume a lot of twisted literature. This reviewer understood… grasped how the comedy and the message of Happy Hour traded off one another. It’s nice when someone really gets it.

This is also a bit gratuitous. Nobody’s written a line like this about the book before: “Fight Club is a poor man’s Happy Hour is for Amateurs. That’s not a jab at good ole Chuck, just the truth.” I’ve never written for critics. But I’ll take those props where I can.

“Hall hath no fury like a spurned woman,” the old saying goes. And “Hell hath no fury like a spurned bureaucrat,” Milton Friedman famously corrected. I’d agree that both are damn angry sorts, but neither, I think, is the worst. There’s an animal far more annoying, more petty, nasty and grating – insufferably, perpetually infuriating.

Yes, I’m talking about the “Napoleon.” The “Little Guy” we all know from the office who’s been gifted a position of power and never lets anyone forget it – inflicts himself on all of those around him. Yes, he was virgin past twenty. Yes, he took his cousin to the prom. And, of course, he was the head hall monitor. But now he’s a man of peerage – a white collar mid-level vassal, with “Esquire” or “Vice President” in his title.

And the fiefs below him Will Pay.

You run into countless Napoleons in law. Every fifth office seems to house another. This slice of Happy Hour is for Amateurs is about a run-in I had with one during my first law firm interview, a particularly odd morning I’d started off by getting hit by a car (the rest of that background’s in the book):

Breakfast with Napoleon

This piece of Happy Hour is for Amateurs deals with an exceedingly common subject – the boss who lives to torture his workers. But as much as we’ve all known his kind, toiled under his constant irritation, the question is, What do you call him? You can spot what makes him what he is. The undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, the mid-life recognition he’s trapped in a profoundly insignificant life… the family he’d love to leave, with the Zoloft-tranquilized wife, Ritalin-addled brats and their heaving tuition costs. And yet as obvious as all that is, no easy label fits. This is where he’s undefinable, inscrutable – where no species or genus applies.

Or perhaps that’s all wrong, the worst kind of over-thinking, missing a plain-as-day answer. Maybe he’s the simplest of creatures, and the only thing making him a mystery is a Jeckyll and Hyde inconsistency.
I’ll never know for certain. But I’ve analyzed this animal at length. Worked with experts in the field, applied the most rigorous testing. And though a sure diagnosis still eludes me, there have been those blessed epiphanies, the occasional “Eureka” moments. In the interests of science, of animal behavior and anthropology… in the spirit of the greats from Darwin to Dawkins to Desmond Morris, a case study for your consideration:

Sudden Asshole Syndrome*
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* Again, you may need to rotate the PDF file counterclockwise to read the piece.

This slice of Happy Hour is for Amateurs covers something I’ve talked about in the past – the “3:1 Ratio.” Something everyone from twenty-two to forty will recognize. Well, everyone who values his or her time… who demands that every hour in the office be matched by, or obliterated from memory with, an equivalent hour spent “blowing the carbon out of the cylinders.” As the subtitle of the chapter notes, it’s a study on “The Art of Balance.” …And a few other things:

Three-to-One
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* PDF link may require counterclockwise rotation in Adobe.

When I set out to write Happy Hour is for Amateurs, there weren’t any gimmicks to the book. No clever marketing bullshit, just exactly what the Author’s Note says:

[A] funny riff on a funny time that happens to have some important points jammed in the mix– the written version of the discussion we might have if we sat down over a bottle of Maker’s Mark and you said, ‘Tell me about the last ten years. And entertain me.’

On style and delivery, the aim was equally simple – to write the damn thing well. Better than the average book.

We must have done something right, because now it’s out in paperback. And the roll-out for the softcover here will be as simple as it was for the hardcover. To anyone who hasn’t bought the book, we’re going to put up excerpts of it over the coming week or so… Let the prose of the thing do the marketing.*

The first is “1998,” the introductory chapter. This one will be a lot longer than any other excerpt, as it’s an Amazon link, and the company decided to make the piece available in its entirety. People seem to like this chapter. Several have told me it sold them on the book. Hope you enjoy it.
And as always, to those who’ve bought the book, thank you.
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* There is one difference. These won’t be out-takes of first drafts of passages, like the “Nuggets” pieces. These will be actual slices of the book, in PDF format. Because they are actual text from the book, however, they will only remain up for a very limited period of time.