In This Economy: The Big Law Kitchen

Where Hokas, Teriyaki Salmon, and Rolling Over to Authority Meet at Noon

“In this Economy” is an essay collection covering the myriad (non-writing) jobs a working creative picks up to cover rent. This is the first entry.

Once or twice a week, if I’m lucky, I bus the tables and stock the pantries at a blue-chip law firm in Beverly Hills. Other than the 6 AM start, it’s good work— lazy pace, kind coworkers, an extra dollar per hour— and I grab the shifts the minute they’re posted. Most of the jobs offered at my food service temp agency are events or galas, one-off blurs of big money, booze, and early-onset tendinitis. The law firm, at least, has a rhythm. It lacks swing, sure, but it's steady, and that clears the bar these days.

It's a beautiful office, with 360-degree views of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Mountains. Dress is casual – it’s not uncommon to see harried partners in sweats and short sleeves—and conversation is AI-generated corporate pablum (I’ve heard, “did you see the email I just sent?” more than once). On Thursdays, I work the wine and cheese mixer, serving the 3-4 people who are far happier at work than their own homes. The snacks in the conference rooms are sustainably sourced, which the clients, including oil companies and pharmaceutical reps, seem to appreciate. Most afternoons, I push around a cart of sparkling water with my supervisor Alejandro, a nice guy from Guatemala who watches a lot of YouTube and says things like “I’m still single because I thought I liked smart women.”

Eight months prior, I was being paid to write sitcom jokes for Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson. As a long-suffering Falcons fan and a recently staffed television writer, it was the best week of my professional life. The only thing I’ve wanted longer than a run at Super Bowl redemption (my father is a Patriot’s fan— it’s been a tough millennium) is to be a full-time writer and filmmaker, to reach The Dream. I can’t say whether I have much talent, and I certainly don’t have Hollywood connections, but I put in the time and effort. Like many well-educated millennials, I believe(d) in Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000-hours, trusting your gut, and the value of my one-of-a-kind voice. It took over a decade, but I came into 2024 believing that all the effort was worth it—that the exchange rate to reward was, if not lucrative, livable.

I’m on fridge restock duty this afternoon. There are neat, pre-established rows of Blue Bottle Cold Brew, Perrier, Arrowhead Springs, Le Croix, Spindrift, Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, and Diet Cherry Coke, that I must never allow to falter. When possible, and it is rarely possible during the lunch rush, I’m to avoid even the illusion of scarcity. All labels should face out. Warm cans pulled from the cupboard must be recycled to the back of the line— many of the lawyers press a finger to the aluminum to check for coldness. This morning, I got an email reminding me to ensure my shirts are pressed before I arrive: have I considered leaving them on a hanger?

***

What is this place? The black-clad kitchen staff I work beside celebrates how “we” won the House and Senate while delivering zaatar chicken to Harris/Walz mega-donors. My Spotify mix on the drive home is called “Bubblegum Brat Punk Samhain Autumn Evening.” The feta is made from fucking coconut milk.

***

My supervisor at the firm, Alejandro, is a twenty-five-year veteran of the hospitality industry, but he went to college to study film and television. This news throws me into a weeks-long depression, but my ego clings valiantly to our differences, grasping for some proof I will not be stuck in this job for a quarter century. Luckily, the differences are plentiful. Alejandro, for example, doesn’t like coffee; I do. Alejandro has a Doberman Pinscher; I have an Australian Shephard. Alejandro hates writing; I’m writing right now.

More significantly, Alejandro believes that successful women can’t ever love a man. If the man is less successful than her, she would never be attracted to him. And any man who has more stature than a successful woman would never want to be with her in the first place because successful men, like Elon Musk, want a woman who is “nice” (that success and kindness are incompatible is a topic for another lunch break). It’s hard to be a man, after all, and not enough women recognize that. But if women did fianlly recognize that, everyone would benefit, because a woman’s legacy is her family, whereas a man’s legacy is composed of his works. I want to ask if those “works” include refilling the ice bucket in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR), but Alejandro signs my timesheets. I try to steer the conversation towards fantasy football, my go-to out route in such masculine situations, but he’s not an NFL fan.

I like Alejandro, despite it all. He looks out for his crew, is eager to teach, and his ramblings have the earnest tenor of a man who doesn’t live alone by choice. I chew on a cold noodle salad pilfered from the lawyer’s lunch line and think about my fiancé and best friend, who is enormously successful and, obstensibly, loves me,. Writing for Bijan Robinson may have been the professional highlight of my life, but getting engaged to her is unquestionably the personal one. Planning our life together is the only unblemished highlight of my year.

A few hours later, as I’m polishing the hand sanitizer dispensers left in every room since COVID, I remember that my fiancé is on her way to see the Lakers’ game tonight— fourth row seats purchased for her by a coworker and client. I do not know this coworker, but I am sure his jawline could crush a peasant revolt. And I realize that this is how it all takes hold: how insecurity knocks, how fear and anger open the door, how ideology waltzes in. Successful women don’t love window cleaners. Being a man really is harder. Sometimes, I hate writing, too.

***

Overheard at the UCLA Law School Prospective Associate Mixer:

“If you don’t have the law on your side, argue the facts. If you don’t have the facts on your side, argue the law. And if you have neither, you should probably settle.”

***

All they talk about during happy hours is the election. “This is Trump’s America” clangs out over and over again, but this year the veneer of irony is far more brittle. The resistance is tired and desperately needs new Hokas. “This is who we are,” the lawyers lament, “he is what we deserve.” I hate such mopey generalizations— America is too large to define, “we” are not a monolith, and our meting of political karma is far from equal. Still, I’m starting to suspect that, while Donald Trump may not be who we “are,” the inverse might be true. And if this firm, like several others of it’s ilk, rolls over to the administration, it might literally be true, too.

The man’s political genius— and yes, it is time we admit it is genius— doesn’t so much establish a worldview as create a space for you to see and validate your own. “They are the problem,” “only I can fix it,” “concepts of a plan” – the devil is in the lack of details. All that matters is seeing yourself somewhere in the hazy fear and loathing. The world order is broken. Someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you. The liberal promise of milk and honey (“Hope!”) just went up $2 a gallon, and they’re running out of it in 37^th floor breakroom. I load up a cart.

***

My first day at the firm, I was refreshing the silverware while two women caught up at the salad bar. The first, an older woman smartly dressed in a pantsuit, piled up the spinach as the second, who was far younger, complemented her workout routine. “It’s not the workout routine, honey,” the older woman (who must have made partner) said, “it’s the diet.” The young associate, lips puckered and planted on ass, acted both shocked and honored to hear the news. “First thing you have to do,” the older partner continued, “is get rid of all that rice.” The younger associate laughed, agreed, and reached for the cucumber tongs.

“I’m serious,” the partner said, “get rid of the rice.”

Still laughing, the associate did.

I’ve told this story for weeks to both friends and coworkers. It was so on the nose it became a comfort of sorts, a real-life scene from a bad TV show, the kind you watch with your fiancé while doing the dishes. It was funny, in an obvious sort of way, and fit cleanly into established norms of the job: wouldn’t it suck to be at one of these big firms, so desperately chained to the heirarchy that you’d scrape the food off your own plate to please your fickle boss?

Yesterday, while re-stocking the coffee mugs on the 40^th floor, I ran into the older woman who forced the young associate to throw out her rice. A candy dish sat on her desk, a phone was glued to her ear, and a laminated name tag proclaimed that she wasn’t a lawyer at all, much less partner, but the office assistant.

***

During lunch, a tentative Alejandro asks me where I went to college. There is rumor flying around the staff that I went to Harvard. I think I’m flattered by this, but he seems relieved when I tell him that it’s not true. But why? Is it because I’m not “one of them” that we serve upstairs? Or is it just too depressing to imagine that, even with an Ivy League pedigree, some people will always be stuck in scullery, staring hopefully at the clock, because our mandated lunch breaks are not billable hours, and rent is due in a week?

***

There’s a whole lot of talk about tariffs, about re-shoring, about bringing the good jobs back. What about mine? The mediocre terminators of Chat GPT may have crushed my dream career as a writer, but at least AI can’t refill a coffee carafe yet.

Of the several jobs I juggle to get by, the one I hate the most is for a generative AI company. Sometimes I write prompts, sometimes I review the generated answers, sometimes I re-write those answers to make them more accurate. The fear that I’m training my own replacement is dulled, somewhat, by the company’s astronomically low standards (I was once told that a model’s claim that there was a ski lift from the Hollywood sign to Santa Monica boulevard was an “insignificant” error). Still, the irony that this is the only writing job I can get is hard to shake. The pay is better than temping, but there are a lot fewer hours, lately. I can’t tell if that’s good news, or bad.

Do the lawyers worry about this, too? How close they are to ending up on the other side of the carafe? Many of the jobs here will be dragged into the Great Trash Bin in the sky, after all. Will they also pray for a golden-haired strongman to bring their jobs back from distant digital shores? Wages are up, but white-collar workers are in a recession, and new college grads with majors from STEM to Gender Studies can’t find work, even if they did go to Harvard.

I should be more thankful to straighten napkins, then, even if it comes at the expense of my dream job. “We” just won the House and Senate, after all. I’d tell the lawyers that I’m the canary in the coal mine, but that would probably be a good thing: I hear coal is hiring.

***

This September, six months after our sitcom got canceled, I worked a restaurant booth at the All In Summit, a 4-day, $5,000 per ticket speaking event featuring Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. At one point, an octogenarian business titan claimed that the FAA should be “more like China” and relax regulations around flying cars. The future vice president giddily acknowledged that deporting illegal immigrants would cause “considerable near-term pain.” Event coordinators warned me many times that the meals I was serving were not for the staff, but guests, and I would be fired if I didn’t comply. The event took place on a quad at UCLA. At the time, it broke my heart when not a single student showed up to protest. If it happened today, I’d be more surprised if they did.

***

I hate so many things lately: Cabinet appointment, algorithms, the ice machine on the 37^th floor. I start most conversations with critiques and haven’t liked a new movie in months. There’s not a development in the world of technology or politics right now that gives me hope. A few weeks ago, I found myself actively rooting for a recession, for country-wide systemic failure, because validation that all of this is not my fault would be worth the pain. Now that it’s nearly here, I’m cheering a lot less loudly.

Something inside of me curdled in the hot and rancid air of 2024. I tell myself it’s his fault but, if I’m being honest, I left the fridge door open long before the election. When I told an old friend all this, walking along the beach with my dog, they simply nodded. They’d noticed the change in me, too.

I hate the next President of the United States with such a deep and corrosive cynicism it wakes me up at night. His view of America, slippery and opportunistic as it may be, is not, cannot be true. I can hardly even articulate what that view is. And yet, as I haul another case of Coke Zero to the 37^th floor breakroom, I think that I’m starting to agree with it. You do what you do to get ahead, right? Muscles exist to be flexed.

***

It’s not just about money, is it? For all my cultural handwringing, for every wry anecdote I write about in the break rooms and kitchens of this awful office, a red pen scribbles a quick “it’s the economy, stupid” in the margins.

Maria, who runs the lunch buffet, hangs out with Alejandro and I before the DEI Working Group mixer in early February. The food is already out, the bar is set, and the tongs are polished. I’m not sure how it gets started, but Alejandro is talking politics. It’s one of my first shifts, so he’s careful, but I can tell he’s excited. “People can hate on him as much as they want,” he says, “but everyone’s getting rich!” Maria smiles—she’s got 50 shares of Costco from when she worked there in the 90’s, and a quick check tells us they’re nearing $1,000 a pop. Alejandro tells me that if Dogecoin hits $500 he’ll never work again, and he’ll have two wives, ha ha!

The whole gang has shoved themselves into the scullery to keep out of sight as we wait for cocktail hour to start. It’s been a long day, and I have no energy or desire to engage. Instead, I think about how Alejandro, who works so many hours that he was forced to give his Doberman puppy to his sister, believes the new government will eliminate taxes on overtime. I think about Willie, the custodian, saving up for physical therapy school by taking YouTube courses on passive income. I think about the firm’s DEI Working Group, lingering by the bar and lamenting Supreme Court picks, and I think about the Hollywood CEOs who claim the coming wave of studio mergers and acquisitions will get us all— writers, lawyers, and caterers— back to work on the stories that really matter. I wonder if this firm will negotiate the deal.

Mostly, though, I think about getting my shirt pressed. I think about my engagement photos. I think about how many cold brews I can steal from the 37^th floor fridge without getting caught. And I wonder if, when this massive, monsterous firm finally decides to donate $100 million dollars to the President of the United States like all the others, there will still be enough left over to hire me back.