Three Strikes, You’re Out: Pants on Fire

This is the last installment of a three-part story about a 27-year-old adult’s first few days working at a real, grown-up place of employment.

On my third day at The Firm, the summer associates were scheduled to board the bus for a three-day company retreat promptly at 2:00. I had stuffed my Firm-branded duffle full of clothes and toiletries and prayed that whatever I had forgotten was unessential—never in my life have I succeeded in not forgetting at least one item. Typically, this was socks or underwear, which, this time, I was confident I had remembered.

I arrived promptly at 9:00 am, duffle in tow, and dove into my research on foreign plaintiffs in class action lawsuits. Around lunchtime, I ventured to the Firm café to grab a fresh, house-made green juice, a true delicacy, which I brought back to my desk to enjoy. But as I sat down, I inadvertently toggled the lever that adjusted the height of my desk from sitting to standing, and, startled, managed to dump the entirety of my precious juice all over my nice, cream-colored trousers.

I surveyed the damage—it was devastating. My pants, thoroughly splattered with sickly green liquid, were ruined, just in time for the all-hands litigation department meeting, slated to begin in 30 minutes, at 1:00. At this meeting, I would meet all the litigators in our office, many for the first time, and I strongly preferred to do so wearing clean plants. But all was not lost. Fortunately, I had a duffle bag full of clean clothes stashed under my desk—what luck! I took my duffle to the bathroom, locked myself in the handicapped stall, and rummaged through the bag for a pair of spare pants.  

There were no pants. I had, as usual, forgotten an item, and this time, it was terribly important; litigation meeting aside, the idea of spending the next three days with my future colleagues looking like a contestant on a Nickelodeon game show struck terror into my heart.

I had to procure pants, there was no way around it. With less than 30 minutes before my meeting, immediately after which we were to board the busses and depart for our retreat, I located the nearest purveyor of pants and bolted out the door—by which, given my then-recent surgery, I mean “hobbled as quickly as my bum knee would allow, which was not very quickly at all.”

Hurrying into the first store, I breathlessly announced that I was in urgent need of a pair of pants in a size 24. The shopkeeper stared blankly at me, then inquired, “Did you have anything…specific in mind?” To which I replied, “Pants, any pants,” adding, “Preferably in a dark color. And quickly, please.”  

The shopkeeper then proceeded to search for pants at a pace of service I have only seen in Love Actually, when Mr. Bean, correctly suspecting that his customer, Severus Snape, is purchasing a fine gold necklace for a woman who is not his wife, proceeds to fuck with him by fastidiously wrapping the necklace with so many bells and whistles that Emma Thompson nearly catches her husband in the act.

After a careful determination that there were no pants small enough to suit my flat ass on the floor, the shopkeeper ventured to the back of the store, calling out in detail the specifications of each pair of pants he discovered, one-by-one: “Hm, well, these wide-legged trousers are quite nice, quite a flattering shape, really lovely—oh, but I see here our smallest size is a 26, well! I could have sworn we had a 24 back here, perhaps it’s in this pile…or this one….”

As the thoroughly narrated search continued, I surreptitiously backed toward the door and made my exit, closing the door carefully behind me before limp-sprinting to the next store across the street, bursting in so abruptly that the woman behind the counter let out a startled, “Oh!”

“I NEED A PAIR OF DARK PANTS IN A SIZE 24, STAT!” I shrieked. The woman nodded seriously, in a way that I took to mean, “Roger that.” She hurried over to a nearby rack, snatched a pair of black pants, and lobbed them in my general direction as I hustled into the dressing room.

They were beautiful pants, and they fit perfectly. I shot out of the dressing room like a rocket and announced, “I’ll take ‘em!” The saleswoman, by then my new best friend, rapidly clicked several keys on the register and announced, “That will be $248.75.”

“No problem,” I said, with all the confidence of somebody who had $248.75 to their name, sliding my credit card across the counter. It was promptly declined. This was, after all, my first week on the job; I had not yet received my first paycheck, and being acutely terrible at managing my personal finances, I was neck deep in a budget hole.

I called my bank, informing them that (1) I am an extremely rich hotshot Firm lawyer and (2) they would need to increase my credit limit immediately because I NEED PANTS RIGHT NOW. Politely ignoring the incongruence between these claims, to my great surprise, they obeyed.

Several minutes later, I strutted into the conference room in my new fancy pants, feeling like a million dollars, just as the litigation meeting was kicking off. As I took my seat, the associate next to me leaned over and gestured vaguely toward my pants, whispering, “Your tags are still on.”