I remember my brief career as a paralegal. It had to have been some cosmic joke, like let’s just get a bunch of young people, set them up with some computers in some nondescript office building somewhere and we won’t really tell them what they’re supposed to be doing. There were like eight of us in the room, and we were all just professional Internet surfers.

And I can do the Internet for a while, but like three, four hours, tops. That’s a lot of Internet, like I’m feeling drained after I’m on the Internet for that long. But back then? When I was getting paid to sit down for eight hours a day? That’s entirely way too much Internet. That’s when you’re surfing the Internet while at the same time actively hating the Internet. You completely exhaust any bits of worthwhile information from all of the top notch web sites, and then you look at the clock and you’ve still got four hours left.

  And those secondary, tertiary web sites, they’ve all got really weird sidebar ads, like why is this web site offering me payday loans, offering me the chance to learn to become a mortician, do I want to meet interesting twenty-somethings from Uzbekistan?

Man, I complain about my job, I complain constantly about waiting tables, but whatever, at least I have to walk around. Take this over there. Do this and do that. Whatever, I’m moving my body. I remember one time as a paralegal I spent like a month mustering up the courage to march down to the attorney’s office and tell her, listen, boss, I’m not doing anything. What am I supposed to be doing? Give me something to do, please.

So she’s on her computer when I walk in, she doesn’t even look up, she’s like, “What is it?” I tell her my concerns but she’s mostly unresponsive. And that’s when I look in a little closer, her glasses, they’re reflecting her computer screen. I swear to Christ, she’s playing Scrabble. She’s sitting there doing exactly the same nonsense that all of us young people are doing down the hall. So what was the difference, besides her law degree? Her own office? She had to sit there for seventy hours a week and us just forty?

Seventy hours of Internet a week, I don’t know if I could take it. I’d have to get into some really niche web sites.