Over at Legality, we’ve been talking about how legal secretaries dislike being turned into bill collectors and having to call clients about past due invoices.

In my last job before I went into legal (I was 23), I had to call and dun people who hadn’t paid their parents’ nursing home bills. There were various reasons for this happening, some of them actually pretty good due to the fact that the federal government (at that time, at least) limited Medicaid patients to only $38 a month of cash income. In other words, the patient’s entire monthly income went to the nursing home, except for $38 that went to the patient to cover clothing, personal hygiene items, and any prescriptions that weren’t covered by Medicaid. Even when you never go anywhere and your entire wardrobe consists of snap-front dusters and Dearfoams, that’s not much money. So some patients were unavoidably and chronically behind. Those were the calls I hated making.

But some patients weren’t on Medicaid because they had money and didn’t qualify. Their children had simply taken over their finances and were running them into the ground, and thus they would fall behind, too. One such case was the mother of a local lawyer. I remember once calling him at his office, politely “reminding” him that his mother’s bill was unpaid. He responded by reading me the riot act about how “improper” it was for me to call him and threatening me with a lawsuit if I did so again. Yes: A 55-year-old lawyer threatened a 23-year-old clerical worker with a personal lawsuit for asking him to pay a bill that was over 60 days past due for his mother’s care.

Can anyone guess what I would do if that happened to me today?

But I did get the last laugh, sort of. Five years later, I was working for a federal magistrate, and guess who had cases in my judge’s court? Turns out, Mr. Blusterbuss was a kind of local, self-styled political-legal crusader, so he had several cases in federal court (most of them frivolous at best). He was a terrible writer whose florid, meandering briefs were just as torturous to read as the op-ed rants he got the local paper to publish.

He was also a frequent caller to the magistrate’s chambers, and what do you know, but I never spoke to a nicer, more cooperative lawyer.

Sadly, I don’t think he ever made the connection between the magistrate’s assistant and that poor little accounting clerk he’d bullied over the phone a few years earlier. But still, it was fun toying with him.