TALES FROM LAW OFFICES #1

IT WAS HOT, it’s always hot. It was that kind of hot where when you walk down the street, already your back is drenched with sweat and at first little spots start to appear on your shirt and then it turns into a full back puddle of sweat; following you like your shadow.

Ashley was an intern at first, then she became employed by the firm that I worked at. In law offices you only get to work on what somebody else gives you at first, and me being lazy I started to give her things to do.

I’d sit there with Ashley and explain what this and that was, how to calculate little bits and pieces and she’d pick it up after a while. I wasn’t a bastard to her like people had been to me. In my experiences people chucked some difficult question at you and if you didn’t swim you were sunk. I wanted to be different and Ashley went well. I wouldn’t say thrived, because nobody thrives in a law firm – they’re generally very miserable places.

Charles was the partner in our section. He wore fancy suits and had also been on television once – that’s why he was the partner, because of his profile publicly; but he didn’t know how to do anything. I read a letter he wrote once. It was probably the only letter he’d written in the time I’d worked there and the sentences weren’t sentences, just meaningless drivel.

So, Charles was also a coke addict, out of six I knew at least four partners were. They’d rarely be at the office and maybe one Wednesday a month they’d show up, do a lap around the cubicles and say hello to everyone and then they were gone again. But, they got work. They would hustle people and the work came in so their positions remained. Another lawyer used to say Charles could sell ice to Eskimos and while it probably wasn’t true, he was more like a real estate agent than a lawyer.

Anyways, Ashley, was her name Ashley? Yeah, Ashley, would come into work every day. Young. She lived with her parents and didn’t do anything that was controversial. She’d gotten the position through those parents knowing one of the other partners, and, as these things go, she was using this job as an opportunity to get UP to somewhere. Nobody knows where that place is in any kind of life sense, legal or otherwise.

She’d put in an application to work an internship at another bigger firm and they liked her and offered it to her. She didn’t know what to do though because Charles had also worked at this bigger law firm once before and he must have left there on bad terms because he would never say anything good about the place. He called them all dinosaurs and has beens or whatever with a bitter ash in his voice.

So, Ashley asked all around the office what Charles would think if she took three months off to do this internship and everyone said she’d be fine – “of course we want you back afterward”. So, she gathered up some courage and one morning and, first thing, she walked into Charles’ office and, after he shut the door behind her, she laid it on him. Then she came out again with a big smile on her face and sat back down at her seat.

We all carried on as normal but that day was special day. It was someone’s birthday. So, as was the custom at this place, we all gathered in the lunch room at 11:00am to eat cake and wish whoever it was a happy birthday for twenty minutes before sitting back down and getting on with things.

Although, on this occasion something was different, Charles was there. We’d never seen him at a birthday before, he was usually away at some beach somewhere for all we knew. But there he was, standing at the back. We all sang the song and chatted between each other for a bit and after that things began to disperse and people peeled off to go back to their offices.

A group of four of us, we’d been there a year or two and had made friends, had invited Ashley to come and hang around with us and whatever and as we all headed back to our respective corners, Charles piped up to just our little group and simply said “and we’ve also got another thing to celebrate, it’s Ashley’s last day” and then he turned around and walked of.

That was the end of it. Ashley didn’t cry. She just stood there and we all looked at each other with no power to make anything feel a little better. That’s just how it was. Ashley had crossed Charles, and that’s all there was to it.

We didn’t see Ashley again after that obviously. That’s the way it is.