Eyes Wide Shut

What does it mean to do your life's work?

As a bankruptcy attorney, I frequently sit next to my clients when they appear for what is likely to be their only personal experience with the bankruptcy process: testifying to an attorney responsible for administering their case at a "First Meeting of Creditors". Not uncharacteristically for most of our limited experiences with the government, this "official" description is a misnomer in more than one way. Foremost, the use of the word "First" suggests that there may be a second, and a third, and so on. Rare. "Meeting of Creditors?" Hardly. Typically there are only two classes of people who appear for the hearing: ex-spouses and former business partners. In the years that I have been a practicing bankruptcy attorney, I have seen more than one such creditor appear for the hearing exactly one time.

Today, for one of only a handful of times ever, I appeared for a Creditors' Meeting on behalf of a creditor. My client had hired me to question a pro se Debtor who appears to have borrowed a small sum of money from my client and then promptly gambled it away. After my client successfully sued to recover and commenced a garnishment of Debtor's wages, the gambler rolled again by filing a bankruptcy. The Debtor employed a petition preparer, but not an attorney; snake eyes.

Doubtlessly, Debtor wished she had an attorney today. If Katie Couric interviewing Sarah Palin was a battle of wits in which Palin was unarmed, then with me at the podium today, this Debtor faced a firing squad. Too daft to be embarrassed? Perhaps. But by my last few questions, even the other debtors in the room awaiting their own Meetings were snickering at the responses. A massacre.

I doubt myself often. But there is one thing about which I never harbor doubt: As between myself and nearly any other person, I will possess a stronger ability to decompose, deconstruct, denigrate, and ultimately discredit anyone else's reasoning used to explain anything not capable of scientifically objective justification. It is unquestionably my finest talent, and why I always believed becoming an attorney was my destiny.

Recently I began to wonder: What if my greatest talent was being wasted on others? How often have I applied it to my own lines of reasoning? What would I discover if I did?