This Paralegal Has a Skeleton in Her Closet

Many of the great professional bloggers recommend that you develop a relationship with your readers by occasionally sharing information about yourself. So I’ve decided to take the plunge and share my deepest, darkest secret.

I have a skeleton in my closet.

Maybe you have a skeleton in your closet, too? Mine’s name is “Budget Bucky”. He was purchased online to be an exhibit for a civil injury trial. Unfortunately, his dreams of being a demonstrative trial exhibit were crushed when the case settled at mediation.

Bucky is fully articulated and provides hours of entertainment. (He even came with extra teeth, which I keep in my desk). I’d like to say that those hours were spent learning the names of all of the bones in the human body, but that would not be true.

Nope, Bucky is the size of an adult and kind of heavy, but that doesn’t keep my coworkers and me from moving him around the office on his rolling stand. We sit him on chairs and couches, dress him in the firm’s marketing caps and vests, and more or less, treat him like a large, unwieldy and rather unattractive paper doll.

Bucky scares people who aren’t expecting to see him just inside the doorway of my office. Heck, sometimes he scares me when I’m not expecting to see him.

My supervising attorney even let Bucky stand in his front office window during the week of Halloween, which didn’t deter Bucky in the slightest from his dreams of being a trial exhibit. But the Monday after Halloween, I found Bucky summarily relegated to the supply closet in my office. He can’t even scare anyone in there.

But Bucky came out of the closet when my boss went to Europe for a month in April. Partly because my boss had left a bag of sweaters in my office, for the clothing closet at my church, including a blue sweater he’s worn almost constantly since 1994. You know how you sometimes associate a particular item of clothing with a person? I couldn’t believe that my boss was giving away “The Blue Sweater”.

The other reason that Bucky came out of the closet was because my boss had gone to Europe without leaving anyone else with the power to sign checks from a separate account for a charity golf tournament. After receiving a continuous stream of panicked telephone calls and emails one Monday morning about a charity golf tourney I knew nothing about until that day, I pulled Bucky out of the closet and dressed him in “The Blue Sweater” with the intent of leaving him in my boss’s chair with the checkbook and a tag that read “Signatory Authority for Charity Golf Tournament”.

But I got completely distracted from my original intent because I found Bucky in the closet, wearing a pair of those gag plastic veined-eyeball glasses. I knew his Halloween had been good, but not that good. So far, he hasn’t said where he got them.