Anonymous wrote:While I agree in part with what you are saying (soliciting gifts is tacky, tacky, tacky), this thread in total reads like Scrooge's diary.
I don't see it that way. In my non-profit arts/humanities world, plenty of educated professionals make fractions of pennies on a lawyer/lobbyist's dollar, especially in the first halves of our careers. We feel privileged just to be practicing our professions at all because there aren't many opportunities out there these days.
Some of these people hinting for tips are actually better compensated than we are. Our levels of disposable income bear no resemblance at all to those of people whose work supports or sustains the creation of wealth, even if we share the same social backgrounds and levels of education.
A lawyer or lobbyist may believe she's reading Scrooge's diary, but I'd say she needs to more realistically calibrate her expectations for the rest of us-- who likely have a lot less money than she believes we ought to have because she simply can't imagine how little we work for! We can pay for the actual services we use, and figure in for tips according to a conservative assessment of who can appropriately expect tips. But we can't just go handing out wads of cash just 'cause it's the holidays because no one has handed us any kind of a (monetary) holiday bonus!