Pity poor me, all the way to my bank
I have been keeping a list of people we don't feel the least bit sorry for, and now seems like the perfect time to trot it out:
Kaavya Viswanathan, the Queen of Schadenfreude, who bought her way into Harvard -- her parents paid $10,000 to $20,000 to IvyWise, a college counseling service, according to The New York Times -- then lucked her way into a $500,000 two-book contract with Little, Brown & Co. She shares the valuable copyright on her first novel with ''book packager" Alloy Entertainment, which helped flesh out the novel's concept.
Now we learn that portions of Viswanathan's blockbuster first novel were copied almost verbatim -- ''internalized," she says -- from another chick lit bildungsroman, ''Sloppy Firsts."
Here is my cautious prediction: If and when the lawyers get through devouring one another, it will emerge that a staffer at Alloy, ''the creative think tank," introduced the plagiarism.
Historical note: A friend with a memory remarks that ''today's temporarily disgraced Ivy League child novelist" is tomorrow's Hollywood successnik. Yale's own Jacob Epstein, come on down! Epstein's 1979 novel, ''Wild Oats," bore remarkable similarities to Martin Amis's ''The Rachel Papers." The kerfuffle barely nicked him. Epstein became a writer for ''Hill Street Blues" and executive story editor for ''L.A. Law," among other credits.
No one feels sorry for
This story rated less attention than Ms. Harvard's copying woes, because anyone who thinks CEOs -- or Ted Kennedy, for that matter -- write their own books needs to have his head examined.
Speaking of CEOs, it's hard not to admire the former
Right, Jeff. Was that before or after you went on the Twinkie diet?
For a sense of perspective on these gonifs' ravings, maybe you should remember people who are worth feeling sorry for, like the 4,000 Enron employees who lost their jobs and in many cases their pensions because of the shenanigans of Lay & Co.
When I first started this list, it looked like a judge might sever BlackBerry users -- a most unsympathetic lot -- from their thumb-numbing addiction as the result of a patent dispute. That never came to pass, but now I see all thate-mailing is taking its toll in repetitive stress injuries. ''I can't whack away on my BlackBerry like I used to," Idaho businessman Chris Claypool told the Associated Press last year. ''It's just too painful." Next up: vision problems.
Sympathy? Fuhgeddaboudit! The Wall Street Journal reported last month that several cast members of ''The Sopranos" want fatter paychecks.
Irked that capo James Gandolfini is pulling down as much as $1 million per episode, lesser actors such as Michael Imperioli and Steven Van Zandt want more swag. They currently earn in the neighborhood of the low six figures, which sounds like a pretty nice neighborhood to me. (I ''internalized" that little mot from the late Boston Herald writer Norma Nathan, who doubtless ripped it off of somebody else.)
When it comes to cushy work situations, it's hard to feel sympathy for the 15,000 American auto workers, some of whom make more than $100,000 a year . . . not to work. They are members of the ''Jobs Bank," a benefit negotiated by the Big Three auto manufacturers and the United Auto Workers union.
Good work if you can get it, not unlike Keith Foulke's being paid $7.5 million a year to do his job badly. Or Mo Vaughn receiving a similar amount from the New York Mets not to play.
What about newspaper columnists? Most of them write only twice a week, and I don't see any evidence of their children lacking for square meals. No one feels sorry for them.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
