Law School Grad Forced Into Retail Job Blogs The Loss Of His 'Last Shred Of Dignity'

Business Insider ^ | December 27, 2013 | Erin Fuchs

[2ndDivisionVet]

As the New Year looms, many law graduates with heavy debt have yet to find work as attorneys — including the author of the self-deprecating new blog "Law Grad Working Retail."

The blog's anonymous author graduated from a law school that was in the top 50 ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He was on law review and even got a summer position at a firm after his second year. He didn't get a job offer though.

This grad still hasn't found legal work and took a job selling cologne just before the holidays to make ends meet. Now he says he's "liveblogging the loss of my last shred of dignity." His blog is both funny and heartbreaking.

The funny parts often involve his coworkers assuming he can answer every law-related question they have. His coworker Shaina grills him after it's discovered that another coworker named Julian is apparently "robbing the stock room blind." Here's the exchange:

"LawGrad, you a lawyer," Shaina began, "can Julian sue the store?"

"For what?"

"You know, accusing him of stealing because he’s Mexican."

"But he was stealing."

"So he can’t sue?"

"No."

Shaina also asks random questions like, "Is it illegal for a hospital to turn you away at the emergency room?" LawGrad tries to tell her he's not actually a lawyer, but she doesn't seem to get it and asks him at least three times what kind of law he practices.

"I told her cologne selling law," he writes.....

[Gritty]

One of the problems is the market for lawyers is over saturated. We have more lawyers in the USA than than the rest of the world combined.

[SgtHooper]

Needing plumbers is an indication of a problem in itself. Whatever happened to people fixing their own plumbing problems. Most such problems are not difficult.

[outofsalt]

“Most law school grads these days have no real job experience. They go straight from kindergarten to law school grad without ever having to flip hamburgers or wait tables or pick strawberries or mow lawns or even toss newspapers.”

Those jobs are no longer available to kids. OSHA won’t allow them to work near anything hot or sharp or smelly till they are older. Even doing it for your folks is considered child abuse.

[Fightin Whitey]

I thought they surgically removed (one's dignity) in law school anyway

No, you have to shed any trace of dignity before entering law school in the first place.

I believe it is the removal of one's "dog nutties" in law school that you are thinking of.

[SgtHooper]

Yeh, in California, that’d be a slam dunk winner!!

[MasterGunner01]

Are you a lawyer? I'm not a lawyer and the closest I want to be to one is reruns of “Perry Mason” and “Matlock” (with “Judd for the Defense” once in a while).

One of my previous jobs involved working with the Public Defender's Office as part of the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) program. These PD’s were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. They were ill-suited to representing the best interests of the child in cases of abuse and neglect before the court.

Forget the social workers at Dept. of Children and Family Services (DCFS)...they were concerned about families and not about the children in those families. Dysfunctional parents really screwed up the heads of their kids, thus preparing the way for dysfunctional parents when these kids grew up and had families of their own.

[SgtHooper]

And if true, that’s because we were the most prosperous nation in the world, at one time.

[ROCKLOBSTER]

Law School Grad Forced Into Retail Job Blogs The Loss Of His 'Last Shred Of Dignity'

I'd say he lost his "last shred of dignity" the day he decided to take up the lawyer business.

[Born to Conserve]

“...sure seems like 90% of the jobs created now no longer lead to a middle class existence.’

Take away the personal and corporate taxes, and they would. The reason there is no middle class is because the middle class is paying the bills for the underclass. If you feel like you should be comfortably middle class, take a tour of your local slum. They have free housing, free utilities, free medicine, free food, and now they have free loans for any damn thing. And you are paying for it. $20,000 a year for every one of their kids to go to school. Go to Walmart and watch who’s buying the prime beef with their Electronic Benefits Transfer card. Do you have and EBT card?

[MisterEd37]

Can't say I have any sympathy for this kid. I have been in private practice for 17 years, went to the trouble of studying for and sitting for bar exams in four states (most recently this last summer), passed every one the first time. As a result of that, working hard and being good to my clients, I can provide for my family and have more work opportunities than I know what to do with. There is plenty of work out there for new lawyers, but they have to WORK for it.

[William Tell]

wiggen said: "We have more people and not enough jobs."

Jobs aren't created in a "jobs factory". They are created by people who wish to make a profit from the labor of others. This bozo would-be lawyer feels it is beneath him to pick up broken glass.

There are few companies whose primary function is to pick up broken glass. On the rare occasion when broken glass is to be picked up, just who, exactly, should be assigned the task? It certainly wouldn't make sense to hire an employee just for picking up glass if the need arises so seldom.

Any employer in his right mind is going to assign such a menial task to some employee based on a perception of how to maximize the profits of the business. The attitude of the "lawyer" will assure that he is not considered for advancement.

[wiggen]

you’re not wrong but someone making 300 a week isn’t getting buried in taxes. Those are the jobs we create these days.

[PUGACHEV]

So, he expects to graduate and step into a well paid job with a firm. Sorry, it doesn't always work like that, but there is always room for a new lawyer, if you are willing to work hard.

You don't learn much that's immediately useful in law school, and particularly you do not learn how to try a case, or how to deal with clients and make money from your legal skills. Take court appointed cases, do criminal and traffic cases, and take cases other attorney's don't have time for. You'll be eating peanut butter and ramen noodles for a few years, but wasn't law school like that? It's hard knocks and dirty socks, but you will learn the rules of evidence in a practical manner and how to put together a trial, and how to examine and cross examine witnesses. You'll learn some valuable lessons about human nature never taught in any school, you'll learn how to set up your own business, and how to be paid for your work and not cheated by your clients, as many will try to do if given the chance. Or, you can ask for it all on a tray by landing a job at a large firm, or not. Want to show me how much dignity you have: cry me a river, or go out into the world and make something of yourself.

[wiggen]

Jobs are created by people who wish to make a profit from the work of others. You mean like Starbucks and McDonalds.
I have had several responses here to my initial post but nobody has said one thing to make me doubt for one second that we’re not creating the jobs we need to in order for the middle class to grow again.
I have very much the same job experience many here have. I interned,i was cursed at, i was treated like garbage. Still it was a doorway and i stayed and it worked out. Does anyone think that method which was commonplace 25 years ago and further back is still valid?
Some idiot got on CNBC a year ago, maybe more said he couldn’t fill all these factory jobs he had. The reporters of course didn’t ask. This was a sign of economic turnaround. I went to their website and went to positions available. Yes there were many. Engineers. It was like the very term factory worker had changed overnight.
The number of jobs available where one can be trained and make a middle class living, 50k in a big city, are nowhere near enough to grow the middle class. It really that simple.

[tet68]

It’s pretty obvious that the subject does not see
any redeeming quality to SALES, it is all so beneath
him. He’s never heard Zig Zigler talk about the place
of salesmen in society.
I bet his sales figures are pitiful, and I feel sorry
for his customers who are not being helped by his
attitude.

[William Tell]

wiggen said: "We had a massive middle class because of jobs and it’s shrinking into poverty year by year."

The massive middle class was not created by "jobs", it was the result of productivity.

Our middle class is shrinking and it will continue to do so until the average worker in China or India has the same standard of living as the average worker in the U.S.

The U.S. was able to build a thriving middle class because of the cultural advantage of liberty and a relatively free marketplace. This was at a time when China was ruled by warlords and India was dominated by an occupying military force.

Now that the fundamental constraints on productivity in China and India have weakened, they will continue to gain and we will be challenged to stay competitive. There is absolutely no way around this economic reality.

High taxes are a drain on productivity. They will be reduced through necessity, much as the taxes in Detroit will be reduced.

Unrealistic environmental expectations are a drain on productivity. These regulations must be eased.

Entitlements are a drain on productivity. They must be reduced or eliminated and eventually they will.

Undeserved wealth in the form of unrealistic pension obligations must be pared back.

The rising productivity outside the U.S. will be the major force dictating the direction of the standard of living for future Americans.

[William Tell]

wiggen said: "... we’re not creating the jobs we need to in order for the middle class to grow again."

And there is absolutely no way that we can. The world has entered a period in which China, India, and many other countries have an opportunity to participate in a world marketplace. There is no way to turn back this clock.

If the time comes when those who are affluent enough to buy Starbucks Coffee decide that they need the money more, even those jobs may be lost. McDonalds may install robots to do the very robotic tasks that are now done by low-paid, low-productivity workers.

The displaced workers must find a way to increase their productivity or accept an even lower standard of living. The luxury of supplying years of welfare, Medicaid, or unemployment benefits will be unaffordable to the rest of us.

[rlmorel]

Thank you for your reasonable response, I do appreciate it.

I do not see those as the only two choices. They are two, no doubt. But they never have, and never will work.

The answer is not to get government involved by forcing producers or service providers to raise or freeze wages.

The answer is to get government out of the way.

Reduce asphyxiating legislation at the federal, state and local levels.

Reduce taxes on business and profits. Make owning a company or industrial manufacturing concern a profitable one, not burdened with overhead trying to meet tens of thousands of regulations.

Regulation and taxes serve the same purpose on business and industry that encrusted barnacles do on the hull of a ship.

Barnacles place drag on a ship's hull to/ the point increasing fuel costs to drive the ship or higher transit costs due to slow speed cause the ship to be taken out of business. In a warship, it can cause the loss of a ship in battle, the loss of the battle and possibly the loss of the war.

We need to attack this not by giving our money to those who can't earn it because they have no job.

We need to attack this by making this an industry-friendly country where people want to start businesses and employ people (AMERICANS) who are going to pay taxes and purchase goods.

THAT is where the wealth of a nation comes from, the industry of a people, not the government that hands out money and provides food and shelter.

I can say this and NOT be against providing assistance to those who need it. But THAT is NOT what is going on today. We have a massive redistribution ow wealth going on, and no new wealth (or less of it than we need) being created.

I just finished reading a book about disasters caused by Liberalism called The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About-Because They Helped Cause Them by Iain Murray. In it, he talks about about environmental disasters CAUSED by liberals and their policies; things like the banning of DDT resulting in millions of deaths worldwide that could have been prevented, the wildfires that nearly completely destroyed Yellowstone Park, and the drying up and desertification of Lake Baikal in Russia.

It was completely the fault of the planners who had no idea what they were doing. One of the major factors was draining off of water from inbound rivers for irrigation purposes, to the point there was no inbound water to fill the lake, and it got stuck in a vicious cycle of less surface area of water to cool the surrounding area causing the temperature to increase, causing the temp to rise further, etc.

The point in mentioning this is that they were siphoning off water, drying up rivers to irrigate, but the irrigation infrastructure was so poor that up to 75% of the water drained off was wasted.

In our societal safety nets, they are riddled, Riddled, RIDDLED with waste, graft and corruption in sometimes equal intentional and unintentional parts. If we gave people flour, cheese, milk, or other basic staples, and and limited it to people who were PROVEN to absolutely need it, we would have no problem.

But what we get is THIS, taken less than two miles from my house in a supermarket, which I have actually seen reposted around the Internet in multiple forums:

This is the problem with our societal safety net. Not that we can't help people in need, but that vast amounts of money, more than you can imagine, are going to all different kinds of government handouts to literally thousands of different government assistance programs ranging from cell phones, to WIC, to Social Security Disability. And these are being administered by vast bureaucracies that are getting bigger, And Bigger, AND BIGGER each passing year, with more, and More, AND MORE people on the government payroll. These programs are huge, metastasizing tumors growing in the brain and heart of our country.

And they will kill us. They may have already done so, and we are dead men walking but don't even know it.

So, the choice is not just to give those without income the money of those who do, or letting them live on the street...the choice also includes creating jobs as described above.

[cherry]

almost all jobs deserve recognition as being integral...

salesmen and hamburger flippers are always the brunt of jokes but I was sure as hell glad Walgreens was open Christmas Eve this year...had to go there twice to get some otc medicine....a few years ago, I had to get a thermometer for my baby grandson who turned out to have a temp near 105F...

we depend on the sales people and the hamburger flippers to be there when WE feel the need....

so Mr. BIG SNOT lawyer....maybe you're sales job doesn't let you smoke cigars and wear $500 suits and act all important, but its making you money and you're serving your fellow man...so BUCK UP or otherwise...

[Organic Panic]

And I suppose thise person remaining in Chicago hasn’t put 2 and 2 together. It is probably beneath his dignity to move somewhere cheaper to live and, shudder, get a job in a small midwestern town for a few years at some land use office?

Nope, let’s stay in Chicago and try to get in to the club owned by Rhambo, Obama, and the gangster government there.

But kid, don’t feel too bad kid. There’s a lot of people with master degrees in sociology, music, art history, and philosophy that serve me coffee in the morning. Best cup I have all day.