Les Miserables

Last month, I billed—billed—308 hours.  A stat made only more disturbing by the fact that it was my lightest month all quarter.  I talked to an online psychiatrist about going on anti-depressants, I started eating carbs again, and I booked an appointment with my gyno to figure out at what point I should look into freezing my eggs.  But the good news is: I got a free milkshake, courtesy of the Firm’s Happiness Committee.

Yes, Firms around the country have found the apparent solution to work-hell: Happiness Committees. Legions of mewling former law-school-student-government members are assembling across the country to think of ways (Free candy! Thank-you directives!) to make us feel better about being miserable.  What they haven’t quite grasped is that a Happiness Committee at a Big Firm is as useful as a Virgin Committee at a porn convention.

Then again, at least the Firms are trying to help.  Who needs, say, time with their families when there are free candy apples practically rolling down the office hallway?  Who needs sleep when there are troughs of Firm-sponsored smoothies raining from the sky?  Think about it: Wouldn’t life have been so much better the last time you worked a 100-hour week if only you’d received a mandatory, insincere email from the billing partner saying “Thank you for your help”?  Wouldn’t that have made up for that litany of nights spent alone in your office, cutting yourself with the edges of a proxy statement just to feel alive?

More than that, the arrogance here is overwhelming.  Do they actually think that spending more time, even if it involves free scones, with the very people who make our lives wretched will make us happier?  There are few guarantees in this world: death, taxes…and that happiness committees don’t make people happy.  For the record, tallness committees don’t make people tall, either.

So, thanks so much for the milkshakes, but we didn’t need them in the first place.  We’re not stupid; we didn’t think when we started working here that it would be like working at a koala-hugging store, only with better office supplies. If there’s one thing you’re guaranteed at a Big Firm, it’s the right to be miserable.  And to complain about being miserable without having a free cupcake jammed into your hole to shut you up.  So keep your goddamn confections to yourself and let us at least own the one thing we can count on, the one thing we’re known for—being unhappy.  Don’t try to take that from us.  Please.