Justified

I shoved my way through the crowd, muttering polite nothings. My elbow hit a man in the side, my foot stomped on a woman’s foot, and my knee hit a kid in the head. I hate the sidewalks this time of day, they’re always impossible to move on.

“Excuse me, pardon me, sorry,” I said, plowing my way through the mass of humanity until I reached work. I work as a clerk for a lawyer and he is really fussy about promptness so it wasn’t my fault I had to shove through people. If my boss was willing to be a little more lenient then I wouldn’t have to be so rude, though I always make sure to apologize.

A lady was waiting for me at my desk when I got in, that was just what I needed, more work. She didn’t look like she had any money either, not with the way she was dressed, people always dressed up nicely to see lawyers.

“Can I help you?” I asked her as I sat down and shuffled through my papers for the day.

“I’d like to talk to the lawyer please, I don’t have a lot of money but I need some advice,” she told me. She looked nervous and I doubted she had ever been in a lawyer’s office before.

“I don’t think he can see you,” I said, making a list of all of the calls I had to make that day. “He’s really busy.”

“Is there another day I can come back to talk to him?” the woman asked.

“Our calendar is very full,” I told her. You get these sometimes; the three penny consultations that take valuable time and don’t know when to leave you alone. The boss never says anything about them but I make a point of turning away any that come to me. It’s all part of my job I figure, to make my boss’s work easier. The persistent woman finally left but she still hadn’t gotten the idea because she insisted on leaving her name and number in case the boss’s schedule opened up. I felt a little bad for her, she probably did need help, but I told myself I wasn’t getting paid to work for a charity and got on with my work.

There were a few debt collectors, small companies, who hired my boss for his services in their suites against clients. A family being evicted from their home because they couldn’t pay for it, of course they were trying to get an extension, sat in paper form in front of me and I organized it for the boss so he could look at it better. Again I felt a slight twinge but I told myself there was nothing I could do about it. If I go trying to help everyone I’ll just wear myself out and I’ll have helped only a drop in the bucket. Still I like feeling these twinges; it proves that I have a heart; I wouldn’t feel bad for people if I wasn’t a good person.

After I had all of the papers in order I gave them to my boss who gave me a folder of papers for a messy lawsuit we were handling. A woman was suing her former husband for being abusive and therefore losing her income, she was a stripper and couldn’t work covered in bruises. Of course with clients like this our business won’t get a lot, I have my boss’s best interests in mind when I think we should turn this sort away and I try to, I can’t catch all of them though. My boss doesn’t know I filter his cases but I look at it as just another part of my job so I don’t tell him. I’m sure he figured I would just know about this part of the job intuitively.

To be continued...