I’m getting sick again. I can feel it coming on- that scratchy pain that starts deep in your throat and gradually transmutates into a full-fledged racking phlemmy croup. I’ve come down with pretty much every bizarre bug that has passed through the greater tri-state area this winter and spring.

I have this theory that, ever since I started working at a firm, my immune system has been gradually sucked out through my eyeballs up into the vent on the ceiling over my desk. Of course it doesn’t help that I have the typical reptilian/girl body temperature, IE my hands and feet turn corpse-white in 74 degree weather and I sit in my living room swathed in a scarf and winter coat until May. But it’s not just my imagination that these firms keep the thermostat set to abnormally cold.

It hit me the other day that working at these places is akin to being trapped in a Vegas casino; the big heads behind the scenes who calculatingly demand the regularly-monitored 68-degree temperature in the building, just cold enough to keep you acutely attentive but not too cold to lower your blood pressure into minor hypothermia, and the doctored oxygen that’s continually pumped into the room to foster a hyper-alert mental state and ensure that you’re wide-eyed and betting (or billing in our case). Add in the few strategically-placed windows and little access to the outside world, plenty of watered-down free drinks – coffee and soda in our case (minus the jiggly waitresses in slinky peasant girl outfits bringing them to us on trays), the cameras watching your every movement (if you think your firm doesn’t have them, must be nice to live in Naiveworld, let me know if the rents there are low), and the 24-hour regular schedule. The midlevel associates are sort of like pit bosses, overseeing everything in their wing and reporting any funny behavior to the floor managers. And the lowlevel associates, the sickly and pale slot players stooped over their machine of choice after taking the all-night bus to Atlantic City, who feel compelled to keep pulling that lever for 48 straight hours in the vain hope that maybe they’ll hit jackpot. I could keep going with this analogy for hours, but I’ve got to go chug some cough syrup and get back to billing.