Well it looks like my run-of-the-mill post didn’t make the announcements. Whatever. Maybe Alpha Man is right when he says Benito caters to the more “entertaining” writers.  What will he ever do without Triforce? Anyway, Another by-product of tax season is that if you keep your ear to the ground you can find out what the heavy hitters are making. After all who doesn’t xerox their W2 at work? Turns out I am the third highest paid paralegal… and that makes me particularly expendable.

Here’s why. I make what I make because a certain partner, Eric, watches out for me knowing the office doesn’t run without me and in his niave mind I am still one phone call away from being back in law school where he no doubt thinks I belong. But partners have been jumping ship and the days when a partner brought his associates, much less his paralegals with him have long since past. Read on, it gets worse.

Whenever you are at the top you make enemies. I never thought of myself as on the top particularly since the take home of my last post was that I need to make more money. But to the working class individuals who becoming a lawyer is just as likely as becoming a pitcher for the Phils me and my comfortable salary look like easy street. Of course they don’t live in Center City. But that’s my choice. And it has consequences. One of them is the current campaign among the staff to get me fired- after all there are secretaries twice my age who make half as much. If Eric finds greener pastures I am sure to be put out to pasture.

Obviously I can’t go back to lawschool now. Let’s not amputate your right leg because you stubbed a toe on your left foot. So that leaves me here asking myself what I want to do. I don’t have an answer for that but I do know what kind of environment I want to work in…the question is whether it exists anymore…or if in fact it ever did.

If it wasn’t for KF Li’s obnoxious posts, two wars and the fact that there is actually a wait list for the lowest possible work in the military I would definitely consider it.  Why? Because in the military you have people who’s JOB IT IS to see that you succeed.  The larger mission is more important than the individual spoils.  And nobody is expendable.  I’ve heard lonely refrain of taps played over the graves of soldiers who never fired a weapon save for training, who never directly saved a life or captured a hill. ”All” they did was serve humbly, honorably and with a comradery that I think has been leached out of our spirit through an over-exposure to technology.

I think…I think that is why so many veterans are homeless.  How could you get along in this world coming from a world where doing your job was an end in itself and people who never knew you, had never been in the same state as you, had a different education, looked nothing like you, might have wealth you couldn’t comprehend or might not have two nickels to rub together…would pause, stop, and salute upon hearing the bittersweet notes that commemorated your passing? And take something from that, no matter how small, and hold it for the rest of their lives?