November 14, 2007
Oh, I’m Not A Lawyer, I Just Play One On TV
My dad loves college football. So for his birthday I got him tickets to the Penn State-Temple game. I knew it wouldn’t be a good game to watch, but I knew it was one Penn State would win; and my dad would get a kick out of watching Penn State win.
What I had not counted on was being surrounded by a bunch of drunken students and alumni, maybe because the last time I was at a college football game I was a drunken college kid. Now, I have been around enough drunken guys to know not to expect them to clean up their mouths on my behalf. However, I could smack an eleven-year old girl on the back of the head from where I was sitting so you would think they would have refrained from dropping the c-word or the b-word or even the f-word on her behalf. No such luck.
There was another girl sitting immediately next to me, but as her husband and the gentlemen behind us started to detail all the things they would like to do to the hootin-honeys on the sidelines, to my horror she joined them.
I closed my eyes and hoped that my dad didn’t hear what I was hearing.
The girl next to me then elbowed me. “So what do you do?”
Not wanting to engage the scary girl with the ugly pocketbook but not wanting to enrage her either I tried to keep my answers short and sweet. “I work for a law firm.”
Her husband then started in on what hateful, awful, not-quite-human-beings all lawyers were.
I know many of you reading this would expect me to have join him. But I didn’t. First, my sister is a lawyer and she is none of things this guy was claiming all lawyers are. Second, a lot of my friends are lawyers and they aren’t awful human beings either. Finally, I didn’t like this guy so there was just no way I was going to agree with anything he said.
He ended his vitriol with a really lame, really old lawyer joke.
I didn’t laugh. Instead I responded back, “Do you know why lawyer jokes don’t work? Because lawyers don’t think they are funny and the rest of the world doesn’t think they’re jokes.” No, I didn’t make up this witty comeback; I heard a lawyer-friend say it once.
Bad Pocketbook turned to her husband. “I knew it. I knew as soon as you started that she was going to turn out to be a lawyer.”
While part of me wanted to correct her, after all, what if something happened in the next couple of minutes and someone from the crowd shouted, “we need a lawyer down here immediately.” and she turned to me. What would I do then?
But the part of me that wanted to use my fake outrage at her husband’s outburst won out and so I turned away from them with feigned disgust.
“Have you ever had to deal with another lawyer personally?” She just wouldn’t go away.
Define personally. “All the time,” I rolled my eyes.
“No I mean, did you ever need a lawyer?”
Define need.
“Have you ever been in a car accident or needed a lawyer to work for you?”
Something in her eyes told me she had, and that the result wasn’t a good one. I shook my head.
“Well, You’re lucky. Once you have been on the other side, like you are in a car accident or something, I think you will understand better.”
Her husband then chimed in, “hey, would you let me date her?”
I kept my eyes glued to the field as if Temple really had a shot at converting on that third down. I was too afraid he was pointing or some other way indicating that “her” was me.
BP turned to her husband, “What? No. I said you could hook up with other girls, but you can’t go out with someone else.”
Sadly, I see more bad experiences with lawyers in this happy couple’s future.
The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers 