a submission from the fag brigade:
From a legal gossip blog:
Just keep this in mind: a good associate is like a good
hooker:
1. The associate ("hooker") will do the most demeaning
jobs imaginable for pennies on the dollar.
2. The most successful associate-hooker will work for both
men and women partners ("Johns"), no matter how obnoxious,
gross, and abusive these partner-Johns are.
3. The associate-hooker will never complain when the
partner-Johns are abusive or their work is unstimulating.
In fact, the better associate-hooker s/he is, the more
convincingly will s/he actually pretend to like the
partner-Johns and enjoy working under them.
4. The busiest associate-hookers rarely see their families
and are susceptible to many kinds of debilitating diseases
and illnesses, including alcholism, drug-addiction, and
depression.
5. Certain partner-Johns will begin to monopolize the
associate-hooker's time, and become jealous whenever
another partner-John commandeers him/her to work on
another project. These partner-Johns will require great
reassurance that the associate-hooker likes them best and
that, given his/her druthers, the associate-hooker would
work only for them.
6. The less a partner-John respects the associate-hooker,
the more degrading work will the partner-John ask the
associate-hooker to do. (Example: if the partner-John
respects the associate-hooker a lot, he'll ask him/her to
second-chair a trial or negotiate a deal. If the
partner-John doesn't respect the associate-hooker at all,
he'll ask him/her to spend the night reviewing 50 boxes of
discovery, or to do an equivalent amount of corporate
diligence in that period of time.)
7. At some point, a powerful partner-John will take the
associate-hooker under his/her wing and keep other Johns
away most of the time, thereby becoming his/her
"partner-John-pimp."
8. At the end of the year, if the partner-John-pimp is
feeling magnanimous, he will cut the associate-hooker in
on a share of profits. This phenomenon, known as a
"bonus," will be a very small fraction of the
partner-Johns' collective profits, the immensity of which
will never be disclosed to the associate-hooker. The
"bonus" will only be doled out with great reluctance: and,
of course, the expectation that the associate-hooker will
continue to earn that bonus by staying around another
year.
9. Should the associate-hooker have a child during this
career, the partner-Johns collectively -- and the
partner-John-pimp, in particular -- will harbor great
resentment toward the associate-hooker for "derailing
his/her career."
10. After a few years, the vast majority of
associate-hookers who have not already left (because they
could not take any more abuse, because they left the
"profession" and found a less degrading way of earning a
living, or because they went "in-house" -- the equivalent
of becoming a kept wo/man) unceremoniously will be told to
leave. This will be necessary so that the
partner-John-pimps can hire younger associate-hookers,
whose inexperience is precisely the thing that makes them
more profitable. It is, after all, no accident that actual
hookers and associate-hookers stay in their respective
lines of work 5-10 years, at most.
Please accept a word of unsolicited advice: learn as much
as you possibly can about the "business" from the
partner-John-pimps for whom you must work, and try not to
take any of it personally. It is, after all, just a
business. Luck to you.
