He had a hanger in his office. The wooden kind. You know, the one with the brass hook.
The tie was elegantly draped across it like a silk robe commissioned for a Roman emperor by artisans who have never once in their lives touched a paper jam.
You know the tie. The kind that comes with a story nobody asked for. This one I had made. This one's from a place you wouldn't know. The ties were a running joke between the attorneys. The suits were a running joke. The jacket, never once touching anything but that hanger, was not a joke. It was a lifestyle.
I started in 2013 at $14.50 an hour. Overtime was not permitted, announced once, never revisited, delivered with the energy of someone doing me a significant personal favor.
The math was not complicated. The tie on that hanger covered two days of my check. The suit we're about to get to. Covered a month. No calculator required.
And then, naturally, he appeared at my desk.
With the particular energy of someone who has never once considered whether their timing was convenient.
"Hey, I need you to call my 2pm and tell them something urgent came up."
For the record: "something urgent" was a non-billable personal matter that could have waited until next Thursday when his calendar was wide open.
The tailor was coming. That afternoon. To the office. During actual business hours. To measure this man for a suit. Not for a wedding. Not for a deposition. Not for any event with a name or a date attached to it. The just-because suit. The Tuesday suit. The because-I-wanted-it suit.
And his 2pm, a real client with a real matter, needed to hear the word urgent from my mouth.
I did what every professional paralegal does when handed something that makes absolutely no sense.
I picked up the phone.
This client knew my voice. I was usually the first person they talked to, sometimes the only one. I dialed. I said the word urgent. With full conviction.
My face filed a completely separate objection. Unsanctioned. In real time.
Clock said 11:32. Too early for lunch. Not early enough to pretend otherwise. The hunger had opinions. Not the quiet kind.
I reached for the Cheetos. The extra cheesy, crunchy ones. Not a thought in my brain, just the queue, the next item, the perpetual forward motion of someone who doesn't get a tailor visit during business hours. And could never, actually.
Then the cheese happened.
The way it always does. Slowly. Then all at once. One Cheeto. Fine. Two Cheetos. Still fine. Not a thought in your head. And then you look down and there is a quarter inch of cheese dust on every finger you own.
The standard move: drag the finger across your top teeth. Scrape. Then the lick. Repeat until professional.
But first, for approximately 20 seconds that felt like 20 fully produced minutes of premium television, I had a vision.
How transcendently, cosmically, deeply satisfying would it be to walk those fingers directly over to that hanger. The tie. Or better, the inside lining of the jacket. The part he'd never see coming. How long before he'd notice. What the expression would look like.
The full fantasy ran. It had a complete arc. Sound effects. A satisfying conclusion.
I closed the drawer. Slowly. The kind of slow that has 99 full stops between open and shut, each one a complete reconsideration of every life choice that led to this exact moment and whether it was too late to make a different one.
The fantasy got one final replay on the way down.
The Unredacted Paralegal™