If there is an afterlife, the first thing Mike's going to do (after hugging his parents and his Grammy) is find whoever decided that the word for someone who literally can't remember how to spell words should be as fucked up a spelling as "dysgraphia" and kick them in the nutsack. Repeatedly.
It's especially galling for Mike because he has perfect recall of what he reads, but when he tries to make those words come back out via his hands, it's like someone replaced the neural pathways with that map from the old Looney Tunes shorts where Bugs was forever missing a left turn in Albuquerque.
He can recite every single word he's ever read until his tongue falls out of his head, but ask him to put it down on paper (even electronically rendered paper in a word processing program) and it looks like something a kindergartner scribbled on the first day of school. If he's lucky.
Not that he's let this stop him.
Well, okay, it might be part of the reason he started smoking pot slightly more than recreationally in the first place, which one could argue did a great deal toward stopping his forward progress in life until Harvey showed up and made him see what he was doing to himself, but that's beside the point. Really.
Since that day that he stumbled into the biggest mess of his life—and, subsequently, right out the other side—he's had no choice but to reach around, grab that monkey on his back, and throttle it into submission. Though maybe it was more like giving the monkey a stern talking-to and pretending like that meant something, because all the determination in the world can't teach Mike how to speak monkey.
Or... whatever.
The point was, dealing with his dysgraphia wasn't a "find the cure" type of situation, it was just a "learn to exercise infinite patience while fighting a daily battle for coherency in written media" kind of thing.
Mike was a shit soldier and his patience was almost non-existent, especially when it came to things he thought he should be able to do but couldn't. But he was also stubborn as a mule when he wanted to be and he could exercise enough patience when he really had to.
It didn't hurt that he had a guardian angel sitting on his shoulder in the form of Donna, who had examined a handwritten note he'd been forced to scrawl exactly three days into his tenure at Pearson Hardman, looked up into his eyes, noted the blush creeping slowly up his cheeks, and said, after the longest pause in Mike's life, "My job is forty percent scheduling Harvey's meetings and then reminding him he has them, fifteen percent transcribing those same meetings, and forty-five percent looking damn good while I guard the entrance to his lair. Guard work is mostly boring once you've got the reputation established and solitaire is getting old."
Mike frowned and said, "What?"
Donna rolled her eyes and said, in an only slightly less cryptic explanation delivered as she propped her elbows on the desk, laced her fingers together, and rested her chin on the bridge that created, "My e-mail box is always open if you want to send me other stuff to transcribe." And then she pulled a sheet of paper out and rewrote his note in perfectly legible handwriting without once referring to a dictionary.
Mike should have been offended by this assumption on Donna's part that he would appreciate her interference, but, after tamping down the surge of jealousy at the casual display of a skill he was incapable of mastering, he was too busy being relieved that he'd never have to reveal to the Great Harvey Specter that his 'golden boy' had the orthographic skills and penmanship of a five-year-old.
He mumbled a thank you and turned to retreat to his desk—and die from embarrassment if there was indeed a God—when she stopped him with a, "Mike?"
He looked back and she said, "Three fourths of the people in this building would head out the door barefoot if they were forced to try walking even a yard in your shoes, let alone a mile."
He half smiled and shook his head. "You can't say that. If they'd been born like me—"
"The hell I can't." She waved a dismissive hand. "The circumstances of their birth are irrelevant except for how much easier it made things when it came time to paying for tuition. Most of them ended up at Harvard because someone told them that was where they were going to go and they ended up here because that same person probably told them failure wasn't an option and we like people who aren't failures at Pearson Hardman. But if they'd had to really work for it? To want it badly enough that they said 'Fuck that noise,' to whatever obstacles came their way?" She shrugged one shoulder. "These floors would be a lot emptier is all I'm saying. You, however, would still be here."
Mike coughed, the heat of the blush surging back up into his cheeks, and said, "I have to go finish the Sprignemwumbenlimdismunm..." and fled.
o.o
Because his Grammy had instilled in him proper manners, he showed his gratitude for Donna's help—and her discretion—with lattes, muffins, and regular contributions to her chocolate drawer.
When Harvey caught him at this one day, he was able to say with a completely straight face that he subscribed to the historically common ideology that offering sacrifices in advance was generally more successful than pleading for mercy after the fact. It was even mostly true in this case.
Donna had accepted her coffee with her usual nod of acknowledgment and told Harvey that he could learn a thing or two from Mike.
Harvey had given Mike a glare and said, "Do you have something to proof or do I need to find you more work?" which forced him to turn and hurry back to his desk, biting back the laughter that had bubbled up, both from seeing Donna own Harvey and relief that his secret was still safe.
o.o
The day that Mike overheard Donna flaying Kyle alive for making a flippant comment about how some people shouldn't be lawyers if they couldn't even use spellcheck was, perversely, one of the happiest in his life.
She so thoroughly blistered the other associate's ears in her quietly scathing way that he'd made his excuses to Louis and left early, skipping the next day as well, and only returning the day after with a huge bouquet of flowers and a dozen of her favorite chocolates.
Donna was, of course, not placated that easily and Kyle spent a good week walking on eggshells and twitching at every staccato step of a woman's heel on the floor.
The side effect of scaring all the other associates into censoring their commentary on the topic was a bonus worthy of a delivery from Donna's favorite restaurant and a nod of gratitude from across the hall as she accepted the warm styrofoam container.
She'd inclined her head regally in response and gave him that half smile that said that she had enjoyed taking Kyle down a notch regardless, but the lasagna was a nice thank you.
o.o
After he found and thoroughly beat the coiner of the term "dysgraphia", Mike's next stop in the afterlife was to find Noah Webster and Gustav Tauschek and hug them to within an inch of their afterlives, the former for his creation of the dictionary and the latter for his patent for the first optical character recognition or OCR device.
Mike had a love/hate relationship with the dictionary because, more than any other book, his eidetic memory failed him there. He could recite the definition, part of speech, and freaking etymology of each and every word inside its pages—in alphabetical order, no less—but he still couldn't spell them correctly without going back to that original source to check—an activity that was torture in its purest form for someone like him, because, despite what they said, dictionaries weren't really the best reference for someone who couldn't spell.
Mike's feelings about the OCR, on the other hand, were purely of the positive slant. It was the only thing that allowed him to actually do any proofing in any kind of reasonable time frame, a task which made up at least half of his work on a daily basis.
Because he was unable to spell most words on his own, spellcheck was, like the dictionary, his salvation and his torturer all at once—and it was, unfortunately, limited to digital documents. Therefore, to ensure the correct spelling in the hard copy documents he checked over, he was forced to add a few extra steps. First he scanned it into digital form using one of the behemoths in the copy room set to OCR, then he opened it in Word and ran spellcheck. After that came the grueling process of looking up each flagged word in the dictionary one by one to check the meaning and ensure he picked the right one from the drop-down list, carefully scrutinizing letter-by-letter to ensure he didn't flip anything around.
Needless to say, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary was always one of the open tabs in Mike's browser and a thoroughly worn hardback copy of the same was tucked into his desk for when he couldn't use the computer.
o.o
There actually was a fairly easy solution to Mike's problems—some of them anyway.
Mike had heard of speech recognition software—science fiction coming to life in the best way possible—as early as ninth grade, but it wasn't until college when he actually got to try it out. It was slow and required time and effort to train the software to recognize your own specific speech patterns and it still made a lot of mistakes, but it made a hell of a lot less than Mike himself when typing and it didn't charge him a six pack of beer per page like Trevor.
Unfortunately, it also cost several hundred dollars and required personal ownership of one's computer. Mike hadn't bothered to buy a computer because Trevor had one and he did all of Mike's typing anyway.
So he'd forgotten about it and six months later he'd been out on his ass anyway thanks to the Dean's daughter failing Algebra. Without all those classes to fill his time and demand he do the impossible each and every day, Mike's need for a program to take his spoken words and write them for him diminished greatly.
In fact, he forgot about it entirely until he showed up at Harvard that week and realized that, shit, he was going to have to do a lot of freaking writing as a lawyer.
It didn't change his desire to pursue this career path—never had, because Mike knew that in the courtroom he could learn to be eloquent as hell and that was what mattered to him—but it did make him seriously consider the feasibility of his (other) seemingly impossible dream. He'd dialed Harvey's number three times that week to tell him he'd changed his mind, but only pushed the send button once and that was by accident. One embarrassing conversation about ties later and he'd hung up.
It had taken every last ounce of willpower he had not to find the nearest dealer and buy enough green to pass a month in a smoked out haze, but he'd thought of his Grammy and Harvey taking a risk on him and told himself over and over not to pussy out until the urge passed.
The sight of an undergrad sitting on a blanket wearing a headset into which he was dictating a paper on the mitochondrial role in production of adenosine triphosphate sparked a memory that took Mike back to his own college days and the wonders of modern computing in regards to voice-recognition technology.
Mike had grinned, vowed to get himself a copy of the program for his own use with his first paycheck, and gone to continue his exploration of the law library.
o.o
A handful of paychecks later and Mike still hadn't gotten the program, mostly because of the cost. The basic home version was only a hundred dollars and Mike might have shelled out for that, but they had a legal version too and that would be a much wiser investment. Unfortunately, commensurate with its worth to Mike's career, it had a price tag about seven hundred dollars higher than the general use program.
With suits to buy—and then re-buy because he hadn't spent enough the first time apparently—bills to pay, and take-out to order in on late nights, Mike hadn't quite scraped together that needed sum.
Thus his undying devotion to and eternal gratitude for Donna.
Still, he put away every spare dollar he could and pined for a day when he could actually get sleep instead of copy-pasting one more freaking word into an online dictionary search field.
There are two more chapters and an epilogue coming, so while I go get those, if you enjoyed it, please leave a note. :)
