Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Monday, November 11, 2002

We had a negotiation workshop today. They told us what it means to negotiate. The guy teaching it said "I give this lecture to kids ranging from elementary school all the way up to adults." The same lecture I bet. This was really boring. He spoke for about 20 minutes, then we had a negotiation exercise with a partner -- not worth going into detail -- and then we come back from that thinking it's almost over and he says, "now I'll just talk for another 40 minutes and then you can go." Great. At the end he said, "I'm sure this is way too much information for any of you to grasp." Yeah, because we're seven years old. What we learned: (1) negotiation is when two sides bargain to come to an agreement, (2) you can be nice or you can be nasty about it, and both tactics have plusses and minuses, and (3) talking about negotiation is really boring. The funniest part of his whole lecture was at the beginning he mentioned that there's a negotiation class we can choose to take in the spring as our elective, but this is just a sample. What I heard that to mean was it was a 90-minute infomercial for the negotiation class. And a very unsuccessful one at that. No one's gonna take his class. He'll be negotiating for his job. And then he'll be negotiating with pedestrians for spare change...