A few years ago, Harvard Law School student (now graduate) Jeremy Blachman started a blog, Anonymous Lawyer. His aims were modest, but the response grew to the point that the site was featured in the New York Times. Publishers got interested, Holt won his hand, and Blachman crafted a wickedly funny story about a hiring partner's quest to become chairman of his law firm. The eponymous narrator begins his maiden blog with a paranoid rant about a lawyer taking candy from his secretary's desk--"She's my secretary. Not yours, and her candy belongs to me, not you . . . Stop stealing my stapler, too. I shouldn't have to go wandering the halls looking for a stapler. I'm a partner in a half-billion dollar law firm. Staplers should be lining up at my desk, begging for me to use them. So should the young lawyers who think I know their names." To call Anonymous Lawyer "self-obsessed" would be a kindness.The blogger's nemesis is The Jerk, his rival for the chairmanship--"We were both named partner the same year, the first time our names came up for consideration. Of course, on the same day I got called to be the hiring partner, The Jerk was named assistant head of litigation. I ripped up a paralegal's paycheck when I found out. Had to vent the frustration somehow." Of course, there already is a chairman, but that is of little consequence as Anonymous Lawyer maneuvers for position and attempts to impress his boss by hosting a party for the summer interns and others from the firm: "The partners will get a tour of the inside of the house; the associates will be limited to the backyard area . . . I don't need to have this party, [but it's] a chance to impress The New Chairman. To show off my house and finally get to exhibit the patio furniture that I had upholstered in the firm's color."
Anonymous Lawyer is blithely unaware of his narcissism, thinking of himself as benevolent, up to a point: "We advertise ourselves as humane, civil places where partners don't scream or spit or make the associates bleed. If someone makes a mistake, we get angry, but we don't do much damage. If someone begs to go see his baby's birth, he may feel the consequences down the road but it's not as if we're going to shackle him to his desk and beat him with the paper tray from the copy machine (legal size works better than letters size, incidentally--more torque). We ignore it when we hear an associate crying in the bathroom stall; we accept an apology for a missing comma." When he started out, people yelled, people hit. "But e-mail has ruined much of the spontaneity of unleashed passion; with the absence of letter openers, highlighters and binder clips just can't inflict that much damage."
The plot line is thin, and the blog-as-novel is a bit old hat. But it doesn't really matter. The laughs are abundant--snarky laughs, snorts, passages you'll read or e-mail to your friends and workmates. While Anonymous Lawyer satirizes big law firms, workplace tribulations are common to many of us, if only from reading Dilbert. Muffin wars, bad coffee, scheming, and self-importance are universal:
"I can barely do anything this morning knowing there's a living creature in the office next to mine. Usually it's just the corporate securities partner . . . but today he brought his dog into the office. Ridiculous. As if there aren't enough animals here already . . . Someone gave the dog a piece of muffin from the attorney lounge. The muffins aren't for dogs. We don't even let the paralegals have the muffins. The muffins are for client-billing attorneys. They're purely sustenance to keep the lawyers from having to leave the office for breakfast . . . The dog barked once. I told his owner to keep the dog quiet or I'd lock him in the document room with the junior associates who've been in there for six weeks, searching for a single e-mail in a room full of boxes. There's an eerie quiet that normally pervades the halls of the firm, punctuated only by the screams of those who've discovered they can use the letter opener to end the pain once and for all. I'd like to keep it that way. We don't need barking to drown out our inner turmoil. Noise is for the monthly happy hour and the annual picnic. Not the workspace. The workspace is sacred."--Marilyn Dahl