The Oatmeal Raisin Cookie

One of the only benefits of working as a lawyer at a somewhat large law firm is that the legion of legal support companies - i.e., the companies that do large copy jobs, transcribe or videotape depositions, or provide document storage services - are always trying to get your business. On occasion, that translates into some decent swag, from Yankees/Giants tickets to Starbucks gift cards to a free annual NYC Zagat book.

Then, of course, there are the lazy companies who mysteriously leave boxes of two or three "fresh" cookies (read: baked in the corporate equivalent of the Easy-Bake Oven, the Otis Spunkmeyer Toaster Oven) for you in your mail box. The first question, of course, is why exactly do I want to eat cookies from a box that anyone could have opened, and I don't know where they're from, and I don't know exactly what strange human has touched and breathed on them? So most of the time I just dump them in the trash. Or I use them as frisbees in the hallway.

But sometimes, on days like today where maybe I had a beer or two at lunch, my slight buzz convinces me to give them a try. Invariably, though, the problem is that the cookies they give you are just plain shit. Without fail, you open the little box hoping for chocolate chip, or maybe peanut butter, but you end up with oatmeal raisin cookies.

Oatmeal raisin cookies are the cookie equivalent of the lap dance. You get all excited by the concept of eating a cookie, you tell yourself that maybe you'll run an extra mile at the gym that night, you feel kinda guilty about wasting calories on a crappy cookie but decide to do it anyway, and then, as you open the box, you realize that this is an oatmeal raisin cookie, and isn't really interested in making you happy -- it's really just there to tease and maybe get you to spend some money. And then you eat it anyway, knowing that raisins have no earthly place in a cookie, and hating yourself a little more with each bite.

I'm convinced that no one actually likes the oatmeal raisin cookie. It's like the fruit cake. They keep making them, and people keep giving them as gifts, even though there's no one in the world who really wants one. And in that way they're kinda like Adam Sandler movies or White Stipes albums.