Waiting Room

Watching Better Call Saul has been really strange for me. In one sense, as a fan of Breaking Bad I just really love the show. I started watching the first few seasons during the initial Covid lockdowns and it was a lot of fun. It's one of those shows that really gets you to binge, with the endings set up just perfectly to keep you wanting more. 

There's a darker side to the show for me, though. The simple fact is that Saul Goodman reminds me a lot of my father. My father was a lawyer who also was a lifelong grifter and was always trying one scheme or another. The end goals were slightly different but still similar. Money. Prestige. Power. A love of all things gaudy. All fueled by arrogance and a desire to be better, at all costs, than others and to proove to all the naysayers just how much better. Saul was a bit more into women and less into drugs than my father was. But the resemblence is striking - even the attempt to cover up losing hair - that the show has resonanted with me in a lot of ways that I didn't expect.

A few scenes show a typical scene in Saul's office. A waiting room packed full of people, many of whom some may view as unsavory characters. People were waiting for hours to see Saul, but when the camera moves into his office you can see that he's not helping a client or working. Instead, he's using a leg masager, talking to one of his criminal accomplices, or bouncing a ball on his desk while he's thinking. People in his waiting room are agitated, but perhaps no one more than his secretary, who obviously loathes everything about the job but for some unknown reason stayed.

It was the same way at my father's law office. He would always double book clietns but then never see anyone until he kept them waiting at least a few hours. Most of the time while they were waiting, he wasn't actually doing anything. I got called in to his office to give him a foot, hand, or face massage on more than one occassion (something I hated to my core as a teenager at the time). If it wasn't me, there would be someone else in there doing it. Or he would be sleeping. Or claiming to be praying. Or doing anything but actually see the clients he had booked all day long.

My father had his office at a few different locations, and the second location was laid out so that the office where the waiting room was in the middle of the floor plan. At one end there were two offices with two people per office. My brother and I stayed in the far office. In front of the waiting room, there was the receptionist's office and my mother's office. Moving down a long hallway would find one office on the right, one meeting room, and my father's large office on the left. At the end of the hallway was the filing and copy room. 

This was the 90s, so there was a lot of filing and copying and printing going on. Whenever I had to print or file something, I had to get up out of my office, walk through a packed waiting room, go to the end of the hall, and then walk up back through the waiting room to get to my desk. The same was true if I had to go to the restroom. Many times I just could not show my face in the waiting room because I would be accosted by angry clients wondering why they took off of work to spend three hours in a waiting room.

These scenes in Better Call Saul brought back vivid and visceral memories of the long days and even longer years I spent working in my father's law office. Instead of going to middle or high school, I was there, many times six days a week and working late almost every day. If ever I left at 6pm, my father would make me feel guilty.

But never as guilty as I felt for those poor souls stuck in the waiting room of eternity.