Author’s Note: “A Little of This, A Little of That’s” conclusion will be up next week.
Too many associates wear depression on their sleeves. They walk around with their shoulders slumped, frowning, staring at the carpet – the telltale signs of a problem down the road. A problem worth abusing, exploiting… terminating. Lawyers operate like school yard bullies. They only pick on the weak. Look like you’re beaten, act like your beaten and, well, you’ll get beaten. The only way to succeed in a job you loath is to make a sport of hating it – to turn your work into performance art.
That’s vague, I know. Let me explain.
Most people internalize their frustration. They sit at their desks, stoic and polite, believing quiet resilience or “professionalism” will inevitably earn the brass ring. In a different time, yeah, I guess that worked. Not today. Not anymore. And sure as hell not in a law firm. If you’re not self-promoting, you might as well stay home. Even in the “United States of States of Amnesia,” where nobody remembers anything before their last text message, the average lawyer’s lack of attention span is amazing.¹ These people run from project to project like rats from one dumpster to another. Most don’t have the time, interest or inclination to separate the advertisers from the producers. To a mind that rarely considers anything beyond the satisfaction of its owner’s Id for more than thirty seconds, the appearance of dedication and actually giving a fuck are indistinguishable. “Angry” and “animated” are easily confused with “intense” and “relentlessly driven.”
Maybe you’re like me. You get so irritated by the toil you have to stop and breathe every few minutes, take your pulse and get your head under control… Hold yourself from smashing your phone receiver, throwing binders of exhibits into the hallway or flinging your monitor through the window. You think it’s the stress, but it’s not. You’re bored – incurably, desperately so. All those years of sitting at that fucking desk, researching, writing, going to court and bleating all those tedious, niggling arguments. You know it’s a horrid life existence, if you can even call it that. But how else do you keep up the cash flow? How do you pay for all the extravagances that help you escape it? And what else would you do? Really, what’s the escape? Every weekend you swear you’ll start looking for a new career, but you only wind up polluting yourself instead. Anything to free the mind, whatever it takes to Forget. Your attitude starts degrading, rotting from cynical to malignant, from annoyed to infuriated.

(more…)

It was October, a Sunday and I was alone, again. Not unusual for the time. Lisa was out doing something by herself and there I was, where I always was, sitting upstairs in the library, drafting a pointless brief for some strip mall developer who was suing investors over a project gone wrong. The case was weak but that wasn’t the point. His was a leverage play, to scare the defendants back into the deal. You either give me the money or I’m going to make you give it to a lawyer. Which would you rather have – the chance to make a return off the investment I’m demanding or a staggering pile of legal bills? Pick your poison. Only one of them has a possible upside.
I used to laugh about pushing those hard-knuckle claims. I thought it was funny, cool and amusing, but now it was getting old. The work was taking over and I was getting coarse. You go into law thinking you can be an advocate for any sort of person, that you’re obligated to put your self aside, forget any personal beliefs and milk the system for your client’s best results. But you try… You try and try as hard as you can to keep that all distant – to remember it’s all just a job. That this is not you – that you’re better than this. That unlike so many of these broken and damaged people you work against and among in this tired, beaten city, in this maze of vultures and hucksters, that your compass, your private standards, are higher than “what I can get away with under the court rules.”
You know the definition of “lawyer” and you know in litigation it has little if any connection to notions of “justice,” “truth” or “right above wrong.” You’re a machine paid to navigate the canyon between what decency dictates and language allows. It’s alright, you think to yourself. It’s an adversarial system. That’s just how it works. So it’s broken. So the biggest benefactors of its flaws and corruptions are those charged with its policing. What can you do? It’s never going to change.
You can quit. You can leave. You can run before you start believing in all the cheap pragmatism that tells you being an advocate is only about winning at all costs – that there isn’t on some long forgotten level an obligation to be reasonable… To not take all you can grab. To not sue on ludicrous bases just because you know you can shake someone into a settlement. To not fire up a preposterous defense simply because a client wants to take a futile scorched earth approach to a claim and is willing to fork over a retainer. To not spend your time forgetting everything you do with liquor, pricey dinners, expensive vacations and hand-sewn suits. To not neglect your wife and “lawyer” her every time she argues with you. To remember you’re a human and no – not every interaction is a zero sum game. That she’s arguing with you because she wants your attention, because for some incredible reason she still loves you and You’re Not There.
You can do all these things. And you can write about trying to do all these things.
Which is exactly what I did. Well, among a few other less noble subjects…
I should start a website. I’d just finished writing the brief that October afternoon and was sitting in the library staring out the window when the idea hit me. It came out of the nowhere, unconscious, but nagging – like a sharp sudden pain, impossible to ignore. And so I started a website. No, not a blog – a website. There wasn’t a plan from the start. No plot outline or bigger idea. Just an inability to hold all the rancid anecdotes piling up in my head a moment longer. I set up a site under the name “Phila Lawyer” and just started typing, exactly what I was thinking.
I wrote for five months, about three hundred pages of text, all of it while I was trying cases, penning briefs, arguing motions and everything else I did at the office. The sleep deprivation was hell, but purging my mind of what I’d seen in the legal field was beyond addictive. The writing was involuntary, cleansing and cathartic – heaving all the futile idiocy I’d absorbed into thousands of other heads.
The site grew a cult following. One night a friend called from a bar in Washington D.C. She’d been standing next to a couple of military officers, overheard them talking about my site and put one on the phone.
“Dude, I love your work.” The voice bellowed through the receiver.
“Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”
“You have a following at the Pentagon. The stuff is great. I laughed my ass off. It speaks to people.”
“I’m just writing what everyone’s thinking.”
“Yeah, that’s probably why it works so well.”
“Uh, thanks. Thanks.” I didn’t know what to say. His comments had floored me. Unless you have no soul, an exchange like that is gratifying on a level few people are lucky enough to understand. You could take all the legal victories I’d been involved in and every bonus dollar I’d ever received and stack them one on top of the other and they’d reach about one one-hundredth of the value of that conversation.

Dinner or masturbation?
At the time I’d been dabbling in the young professional dating scene, even trying a couple traditional dates. In fact, I had one set up for the following night, with an associate from some satellite office of a firm just outside the city. She was attractive and I wanted to see what was under her business suit. The problem was the “dinner ritual.” A dreadful exercise – so formal and detached, with that ocean of tablecloth between you and all that protocol… It feels like you’re on a job interview, volleying vacant filler dialogue back and forth.
“What’s your practice like?”
“You know – standard litigation.”
“I’m thinking of switching firms. Maybe shifting to the finance side.”
“Really?”
“The partner track at my firm is too long, and it seems even longer for women. And I don’t see them investing in the regulatory law area.”
“Regulatory law seems nice. There’s always a need for it.”
“Are there other areas you’re interested in besides litigation?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to pick some specialty. It’s all about being a specialist these days.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see. You want another pinot grigo?”
“I think I’m just going to do a decaf cappuccino. I have yoga in the morning. Hot yoga. Have you ever tried hot yoga?”
“Uh… I don’t think s–”
“You want to split some tempura-fried ice cream? The green tea flavor is soooo tasty.”
“Sure… sure. Sounds delicious.” ^{It’s during these moments you start thinking, masturbation is really underrated. So this was “growing up? Chichi restaurants, shop talk and intentionally “hip” urban hobbies? All this cheap signaling just to broadcast “highly educated, stable, financially secure mate?” It seems for a lot of people facing thirty in a few years, the dating lingo shifts. “Great fuck” or “in love” make space for phrases like “compatibility” and “similar ambitions” angling into the lexicon. Between twenty-two and twenty-seven the scene changes from a world of lust and hook-ups to what a corporate strategist would probably call a “relationship plan.” You walk away from dates feeling as though you’d just pitched a bank for a business loan.
———-
1} In fairness, it is. I like green tea, and green tea ice cream. I just don’t like hearing it ordered.
A Flaw in the Uniform
It wasn’t until the end, when we stood up to leave, shook hands and offered each other the obligatory “I’ll be in touch” and “I hope we can get this thing done” comments people give each other at the conclusion of every meeting that I realized what had creeped me out about Marcus from the moment I first saw him. It was mean and unfair, I knew that. The problem was native and permanent; not much he could do to fix it. Well, at least the part of it he hadn’t created (the gaudy ornamentation that only served to draw attention to the malady). Still, as I stood there staring at it, I couldn’t help thinking, Shit, those chicks were on to something…

(more…)

Editor’s Note: Philalawyer is “on assignment” through Wednesday. Part III of “The Farther We Go The Rounder We Get” will be up when he gets back. In the interim, here’s a little piece on some amusing manifestations of status anxiety in the legal field. And “The A Team.” Well, part of it… .
“Not both of them.” I snapped into the phone. “You’re wrong. I’m positive.” I was half paying attention to the conversation, barking into the receiver as I sat in the lobby, leafing through the firm’s brochures on the coffee table.

Fistlewait, Harriman, Fortescue and Marmalard was formed in 1905, when Johnston Auchincloss Fortescue returned to Philadelphia upon graduation from Yale Law School, Cum Laude. Fortescue, grandson of Jacob Browning Auchincloss, private counselor to John Penn, second Colonial Governor of Pennsylvania, had seen the need for counselors in maritime law to serve Philadelphia’s growing importing sector after managing his family’s Caribbean trading interests through the Spanish American War. Upon returning from Yale, Fortescue and his first cousin, Peterson J.K. Fistlewait formed the firm, purchasing office space in the East Atlantic Building, the jewel of what was then known as Spice Traders Row. They quickly solicited a stable of notable clients including Featherbottom Iron & Coke, Ltd., Pepperidge Trolleyworks and the Johnstown Dam Liability Trust.
Much has changed since then, but FHFM remains committed to the values and vision of its founders, to provide the finest representation to its clients and uphold the Philadelphia legal community’s storied tradition of
spirited, but genteel advocacy.

“Jesus, where’s the ‘Irish need not apply’ disclaimer?”
“What?” The voice on the other end boomed out of the receiver.
“Was I talking out loud? Just something funny I was reading.”
“So I don’t warrant your full attention?”

(more…)

Gunners
Everybody who’s been to law school knows these people…
Kevin was what law students call a “gunner,” meaning he ran his mouth off like a machine gun through every class. Law schools still attempt to emulate the Socratic Method used in The Paper Chase. The professor stands before the class, selecting students at random to provide “outlines” of lengthy, incredibly dull cases the student was supposed to read the night before. The student, in turn, is supposed to recite the legal issues in the case while the professor peppers him with questions designed to trip him up.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, in theory. In reality, most students bring laptops with outlines on them, or casebook Cliff’s Notes published by a company called Emmanuel’s. If they’re unfortunate enough to be called on by the professor – ripped from out of a daydream or a hangover – they pitch back a clumsy recitation of the crib notes on the case. It’s not much different than standing in open court, making a real argument, where most lawyers don’t half the answers to the questions the judge is asking. But if the process is supposed to train a student to “prepare, prepare, prepare,” well, it’s pretty much a farce. The average semi-intelligent student sleeps through class, crams at the end of the semester and only really shows up for exams.
In the vacuum of class participation are the gunners, a subset of student who came to the law looking for purpose. The gunner reads the actual cases. He reads a treatise on the cases. He reads biographies of the judges who wrote the opinions and analyzes every issue, from every angle. Armed with endless niggling observations and more interpretations of any given case than have been cast on Shakespeare, he raises his hand in response to every question the professor asks, debating his every point, finishing his sentences and volleying back his every closing comment with “Yes, professor, but what if…?”
This was Kevin. He couldn’t help his obnoxiousness. It was unconscious. He’d thrown himself into the gunner’s world – a black hole of endless dicta-parsing and mind-numbing midnight arguments with his fellow Trekkies about obscure Supreme Court dissents and the legislative intent behind constitutional amendments. He must have thought knowing everything, throwing every fiber of his being into the concept of law studentry and soaking up every irrelevant detail of every case we studied would render him the world’s greatest legal mind. Maybe he assumed the brain was as simple as a bicep – more curls, more strength. My guess is he just wanted to have something to be, other than what he was.
The Perils of Waking and Baking
No, it’s not a good idea.
Of all the “office highs,” “waking and baking” is the worst. My buddies Les and Martin had been ardent fans of the therapy, and when either of them saw me out, guzzling bourbons and bitching about how much I hated being in the office, it was always the same proselytizing… “You’re way too stressed. You need to bake before you go in. It makes the mundane shit interesting. The work becomes a game.” To me it seemed a horrible idea and terrible waste of dope. I couldn’t blast Traffic or Zeppelin in my office or swap favorite scenes from Trainspotting with my secretary. And what if a partner roped me into some awful meeting? “Hey, __________, can you sit in on a strategy meeting in the Rocco’s Industrial Meats case? You know… The one where the guy claims he lost an ear due to an improperly designed conveyor belt. We need a new set of eyes on it.” The cost/benefit ratio was terrible. Yes, the “wake and bake” did work, and yes, it could make the morning amusing. But when it failed, it made an already annoying situation fifty times worse.

(more…)

Getting hit by a car the morning of that first interview was probably a sign from above. An omen — God or nature or whatever cosmic force runs the program giving me a hint, and me too stupid to take it.
It was the summer after graduation. I was living at home, studying for bar exams. People say that’s a stressful gig, but it seemed more holiday than anything else.¹ Wake up at 10:00, fix breakfast, go to the gym for an hour, come home, turn on music and study on the deck. When I’d memorized enough material I’d go out with friends or rent a movie. Two nights a week I’d go to a bar review course. It was a great summer… Sunshine, free food and a stack of Allmans and Dead discs playing in the background.² The only annoyance was being penniless. Freeloading whiskeys from friends was terribly embarrassing.
I remember the sun waking me up on the morning of the interview, on a couch in the family room downstairs. Shit. I’d wanted to be up at 8:00, but my watch said 8:45. I had less than an hour to race into Philadelphia, park and run into a law firm in the center of town. I showered, shaved, ran out the door and jumped in the truck. Son of a bitch, I slammed my hand on the dashboard. The gas tank was empty. I’d reminded myself half a dozen times the night before – Make sure the truck has gas… Fill the gas tank… You didn’t fill the gas tank yet! The self-nagging was wasted. As soon as I started watching television I forgot about the interview. It’s always been like that. Try as I might to stay on focus, the minute anything sidetracked me – a newspaper open on the kitchen counter or a phone call from a friend – I forgot everything I was doing. It was annoying to have to run like a madman to make the interview on time, but I couldn’t say it was surprising. I did everything at the last second, and though I never admitted it out loud, that was clearly how I liked things – running, confused, planning as I went. There’s a freedom in menacing deadlines. Instinct takes over and all you can do is react… You hope.

(more…)

Due to scheduling constraints, the fourth and final part of “The Line” will be posted on Thursday. In the interim, here are a few more book out-takes.

On Experts

Most cases are only as good as the experts supporting the claims or defenses being made. These experts come in all varieties, of course, offering opinions on every conceivable subject that winds up at issue in a courtroom. From the post traumatic stress disorder caused by a botched tattoo to the wanton negligence of a shopkeeper selling Pop Rocks in close proximity to Coca Cola, if you can claim it half sober, there’s a “whore” a phone call away who’ll slap a stack of supporting scholarly references and anecdotal inferences behind it in exchange for the right sized check. They even have their own broker services. In every large city there’s a company you can call and order experts exactly the same way you’d order “dancers” for a bachelor party:

Dancer:

“Yeah, I need a blonde and an Asian girl. Skinny, with tight asses. No cottage cheese. Girls who know the drill.”

Expert:

“I need an accident reconstructionist and an economist. With some experience in court. No prima donnas. Guys I can handle.”

“Expert” in the litigation game means “Lawyer’s Proxy.” At anywhere from a few to hundreds of thousands of dollars for testimony and reports, offering dressed up professional opinions is huge business. Doctors whine about medical malpractice lawsuits, but a load of them pay their kids’ tuitions offering expert evidence against their own fellow physicians. The big accounting firms have developed a cottage industry out of it, devoting whole departments to running stock analyses on financial books and pumping out form reports in economic fraud cases for six and seven figure retainers. Engineers and chemists and scientists offer books of graphs and charts no one understands propping up every variety of product liability action.

And they all do what we tell them to. We tell them what we’re claiming before we hire them, so they know what they’ll be expected to say. If they don’t want to say it after they see the evidence, we fire them and hire someone else. As they put together their reports for us, we call them and discuss their findings. But they never send us any drafts because under the court rules, if the opponent asked for copies of those drafts, we’d have to turn them over, allowing the other side to see what we removed from or modified in the final report. And when the expert’s findings aren’t strongly worded enough in our favor we hammer away at them, in meeting after meeting, pushing the language of the thing as far as their professional ethics will allow. In the end, we rarely get exactly what we want, but we get what we need. As partners have told me in the past when experts balked at directives, “You have to remind these people — they work for us.”

On Being a Professional Dilettante

A Juris Doctorate makes you so much more than a mere “doctor of laws.” A decent advocate gets to play doctor of engineering, aeronautics, economics, environmental planning, corporate governance, toxic waste handling and every type of medicine or manufacturing from which a person can routinely claim to have been injured and sue for damages. You won’t find “professional dilettante” next to “attorney” in any dictionary or thesaurus (probably due to fear of a responsive class action suit), but that’s basically the definition of “litigator.” We know just enough about what we’re arguing to look like authorities on the subject in front of a judge or jury of people who don’t know anything about it… Or at least convince an opponent we would.

There’s no special trick to it. We do the same thing your broker, insurance agent, consultant and every other category of middleman who sends you a bill or “takes a cut” does. A third of the skill is getting a license, a third is offering the service people pay you to provide and the last third – the most important one – is learning the industry lexicon. No professional talks in simple layman’s terms. They glorify and blur the simplicity of everything they’re doing by using a secondary language nobody outside the field would understand. That’s their barrier to entry, the thing that keeps the client in the black about what he’s paying them to do or wondering why, with the benefit of a short correspondence course, he couldn’t just do it himself.

Your insurance agent will talk about “comps” of homes nearby and the “replacement cost scoring” when he explains your rising home insurance premiums. A broker will throw words like “no load,” “blended” or “sleepers” at you, spaced just far apart enough in the conversation to avoid sounding like a used car salesman while at the same time demonstrating he knows a lot of important things you couldn’t easily find online. Consultants speak in terms of “synergies,” “redundancies,” and “reallocations.” They do all sorts of “modeling” to “optimize” and “capitalize,” for maximum “maximization.”

Still, they’re all second team, pikers compared to lawyers. Litigators don’t just dabble in “surface intellect.” It’s their native tongue, the fuel of their arguments – the only way they can manage all the calls from opponents, clients and co-workers on countless different issues in a dozen or more cases involving disparate subjects and fact patterns. When they’re good at it, litigators can shift seamlessly from a telephone call about an action involving derivatives contracts to one about a construction accident, all while proofreading a brief in a products liability case. Few have a broad knowledge of the fine points of any case they happen to be discussing, but they’re masters of language, able to confidently use industry terms moments after first hearing them.¹ And they know the same way you could skate through an essay test by referencing one or two obscure facts to give the impression of deeper knowledge you can convince any client or opponent you’re in control of the information by throwing out the occasional bit of industry jargon in a casual, understated fashion. For most of the people litigators need to deal with, at least up to trial, where they have to really understand the subject matter, that’s as good as actually knowing what they’re talking about.
———-
¹ Outside the hard sciences and finance, half of what seems to pass for ability or proficiency is facility with “insider” language – an odd measuring stick. Lock a man in solitary for ninety days with nothing but old Michelin guides and he’ll come out a passable restaurant critic, conversant in the phrasing and language of the trade. It’s hardly a novel observation, but “semantic knowledge” always struck me as something people demonstrate in the absence of productivity. Next time you’re in a long meeting with colleagues, make two columns on a piece of paper and rank each person in the room by: (A) effectiveness; and, (B) use of industry jargon. Place the highest ranking names at the top of the column and work down in the usual fashion. At the end of the meeting, draw lines connecting each person’s name in column “A” with its placement in “B.” See how many “X”s you get in the middle of the page.

Preliminary Note: I wound up enjoying the long weekend a bit more than I anticipated. Consequently, my final edits on Part III of “The Line” will not be up until Thursday. In the interim, here’s another installment of the “Nuggets” series. Apologies for the delay.
- PL

…Like most things in my life, I only realized I’d bought a rusted lemon of a career ten miles down the road, standing next to the heap, reading the “BUYER TAKES AS IS” fine print on the sales ticket. So I did what hundreds of thousands of lawyers do every day:

If they kept “real life” records, 80 percent of lawyers under 35 would submit time sheets including entries like that. After about three years of that futile wheel spinning, and endless conversations with career consultants and job placement specialists, you realize that unless you’re a transactional lawyer or employment litigator, businesses don’t want or need you. The old saying – “You can do anything you want with a law degree” is technically true… In the same sense that you can do anything you want with a degree in Eastern Religions or a union card.

No one outside law firms is stopping general litigators from doing something else, but they’re not paying them to do it either. If you ask a career consultant or an HR specialist, they’ll tell you point blank – “Litigators are trained to be adversarial and they tend to alienate people. We pay for that skill set when needed, but there’s no need to have it around all the time. And you can’t even fire them. When you do, they sue you.”
———-
¹ See Rushmore soundtrack. Still the finest obscure gem Wes Anderson has dusted off in one of his movies. Though his use of the Kinks’ “Powerman” in The Darjeeling Limited does come close.
To read more outtakes from the upcoming PhilaLawyer book, see “Nuggets,” Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III, and Vol. IV.

If you’ve had a boss over forty-five in the last decade, you’ve probably heard him lament a loss of work ethic among people from twenty-two to thirty-five. They say things like “The kids have no loyalty these days,” or “They don’t put in their dues.” Partners whine about working more because the associates won’t slave weekends, managers gripe about job jumpers bolting for the next better offer a headhunter pitches and doctors moan about interns refusing to stay up for days on end. And they all complain about investing thousands of dollars into “bright young minds” who quit to spend more time with their families or take off into some wild entrepreneurial venture after an early midlife crisis. They call us “get rich quick artists” behind our backs.

They’re right. We are get rich quick artists. We’re the Get Rich Quick Generation. And more than that, we’re the Get Rich Quick Doing Something You Like Generation. You think I’m writing a book for free? They gave me a nice check, and the thinking is, this will sell, and somebody will give me more, to write about other things. It’s a calculated risk. Like a lot of jobs, law pays according to what I’d call a “pain for dollars ratio.” The amount of annoyance, repetition or tedium in a profession results in a congruent income increase. The amount of enjoyment and true creativity one experiences in his work corresponds with a decrease in income. The only escape from it seems to be acquiescence – aging into the job and getting better at it, so the time and intellectual investment required to do the work decreases, making it more tolerable, providing the illusion of forward progression and happiness. The only problem is, as the money and the ease of the toil increase, time passes and your options decrease. Taking a chance on getting lucky – trying to find a job you love or something that might create enough capital in one shot to vault you out of the work force – rots into a fantasy.

The old guard love to see our generation fail in entrepreneurial endeavors because it reinforces the certainty and pragmatism that underpin their measured, conservative decisions. In the late nineties, I remember reading dozens of quotes in the legal trade rags from angry gray-hairs ripping the gold rush mentality of young associates who were jumping ship to take a chance at getting obscenely wealthy working for dot coms. At the same time, an exchange of salary information between lawyers on the internet drove first year associate salaries at top flight firms into six figure territory in every metropolis, even Philadelphia. For a “company man,” one of those partners who’d put in years of grueling hours, that must have been a sharp slap in the mouth. The kids weren’t just jumping ship; firms had to pay them premium dollars for the sliver of time they had the little bastards.

And worse than all of that, I think every partner or manager in every type of business understood that this was just the beginning of a long, ugly trend, at least for them. There’d been a seismic shift in the leverage dynamic, and nobody could figure out when it happened, why it happened – what caused the fucking thing. Suddenly the kids just started thinking differently. Management still had a general sense of control; money would always rule employees in the short term. But in the longer view, these new generations were demanding something else – something the business model couldn’t offer.

Now, closing in on a decade later, first year associate salaries at the best firms have climbed above $140,000.00 in most markets, $160,000.00 in others. The decent small and mid-sized shops have been forced to offer six figure starting salaries to compete and everybody from clerks to public defenders to judges have enjoyed ripple effect raises. Economically speaking it’s never been better to be an associate and still, even with all those pluses, the only thing eclipsing salary inflation remains, you guessed it – attrition. I guess the bloated paychecks are supposed to work like a billboard, attracting top associates to the firms and talented minds to the industry. But that’s only one perspective. From a different angle it looks like hazardous duty pay – the hallmark of something absent any other attraction.

“Can you hold this for a second?” She handed me her drink and took off her jacket. I have to assume women either don’t care or don’t realize what happens when they push out their rib cage taking off a coat. Thrusting a set of breasts in a man’s face puts him in an impossible situation. He has to try not to leer, but also not look away so obviously that it makes the moment uncomfortable. In this case, I had no choice. I had a head full of vodka and I hadn’t been laid in forever. Her dress was tight and sheer and yes, it was damn cold in that bar.

I must have stared for five seconds – forever in a situation like that – before I realized what I was doing and snapped out of it. How couldn’t I? Rock hard nipples are like fireworks or lightning. It’s impossible to stop looking, no matter who they belong to. Every man’s had that horrible moment in the dead of July, where the air conditioning is on full blast and some 60ish, 200 pound secretary or 401(k) administrator comes into your office and starts talking about some document you need to review or sign. She’s running on about something serious and work-related but all you can think of is those huge udders at the end of her massive, Double E torpedos poking through her bra at asymmetric angles, pointing toward the floor. Your mind stays on one repeating message. Don’t look down. Never look down. Stare at the eyes. The eyes, damnit.

Even more disturbingly, the phenomenon isn’t limited to women. A nauseating result of the “corporate casual” movement is the prevalence of ample bosomed males in pleated dress pants and golf shirts. Four of five lawyers have “office physiques.” Not walrus-like or Michelin Man fat – more sagging, swollen and flabby in bad places, the sort of people who should never wear anything form fitting. And yet, at least once a day in the summer you’ll find yourself talking to a co-worker in a tight golf shirt, rolls pouring over his belt, with B-cup man breasts and his high beams on full blast, thinking to yourself, Jesus, man, have you no fucking shame? Put those things away. I’m about to lose my fucking lunch here.

The only people who seem to be aware of high beams are young women. They walk through the office in the summer with their jackets on or their arms crossed tightly over their chests, leading to awkward conversations where both of you pretend not to notice their odd hunched-over, forearms-folded posture through the whole discussion. They understand. Nipples are important. Everyone focuses on the size and hang and curve of the breast, but it’s the hood ornament on top that makes all the difference. Replace the Flying Lady on a Rolls Royce with a crucifix, pyramid or Venus de Milo and you’ve ruined the car, no matter how amazing the rest of components are. A bad nipple on a perfect breast works the same way. It’s an awful letdown unhinging the bra on a spectacular set only to discover they’re topped with tiny, pinpoint nipples. The nipple is crucial, and only a fool or a eunuch would say otherwise. The law knows. It doesn’t ban the public display of breasts. It bans nipples.

I’m not going to rate every type. That’s a matter of taste. There are the brown ones you get with darker skinned girls and pink ones you get with fairer women. Some are so light they’re near indistinguishable from the skin around them. Some are riddled with fleshy little pebbles around the nipple itself and some are puffed out all around or cone-like, as if the areola and nipple are one in the same. Most tend to be circles, but I’ve seen ovals now and again. Some point up, some down, some 90 degrees dead ahead. I’ve seen them tilted outward and I’ve seen them centered. The larger the breast, the more the areola tends to look stretched. Smaller, pert breasts have always been my favorite. They seem to always have these fat knobs that point out sharply, just as hers were in that dress. As I stood there holding her drink as she took off the jacket the only thought running through my head was, Christ, you could hang wet towels off those things.