was a Roman-style luncheon complete with feathers and buckets, and a few weeks ago the theme was "the first bite is the best," where you take one bite of, say, a New York strip steak and then throw the rest over your shoulder on to the floor.  I remember at one particular gathering last fall, one of the servers (who was this perfectly funny illegal immigrant from Honduras, which is really all we use at the agencies nowadays, and they get paid about $50 an hour, which is really a pittance when you think about it, and his name was "Enrique" or "Omar" or something like that) tripped and dropped an entire tray of champagne all over the floor, and Alicia's department chief took her head out of the bucket by her chair and said, "Oh well! Guess we'll just have to fine DuPont another billion or so!" Oh, how we laughed! I truly believe that there are people in this country who think that we actually live like this. That everything is just buckets of free money from the sweat of the taxpayers, or that our jobs are pointless and redundant or that we don't actually have to do anything. And it certainly doesn't help when reports like this one come out: "The Washington region has emerged from the recession looking even more affluent compared with the rest of the country, boasting seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes in the nation, new census numbers show."