May have lost many battles, but won the war

Last night I received an envelope from Citibank. It was a thick envelope. Hands shaking slightly, with a lump in my throat, but with the hopefulness of a student who just got a thick letter back from one of the colleges she applied to, I opened it up - and there it was! A Citibank platinum credit card. With a very high credit limit. It may sound idiotic, but I felt like calling up all the various call center and store-card people who had rejected me - to let them know that I don't need them because I can go through the back door and use my law firm to help me become a real person over here.

Of course, I should really not be proud of myself. For all the bad things I say about my clients, some of my bosses and the corporate world in general (on a daily basis, might I add), I am just like them - taking advantage of the "good things" it has to offer. David thinks that I am prejudiced against rich people. I think that is true. That is partly why I make a point of talking to the poorest people (my mail guy and cleaning personnel friends) with the most attention. I assume that they are good and interesting people because they are poor and ignored. So I give them a chance. Meanwhile, I assume that my bosses and clients are bad and boring people because they make a lot of money and are not shy about it. So I don't give them a chance. Meanwhile, I am a hypocrite and a fraud.

This is only partly true. Long years of experience with investment bankers have left no doubt in my mind that pretty much anyone who attends an Ivy League business school in the U.S. (regardless of what kind of person they might have been prior to that) is injected with some kind of special serum that turns them into pompous, unbearably arrogant and unpleasant a-holes, who from then on remain convinced that the world would stop spinning without them. This firm belief of mine would be difficult (if not impossible) to shake. However, I maybe should be a little more patient with corporate lawyers...after all they (we) are slaves to those described in the previous sentence and that, in itself, is punishment enough.