In Praise of the Lowly Lab Coat

I worked for ten years for doctors before becoming a paralegal. I would choose lawyers over doctors as employers any day. In spite of all the lawyer jokes you hear, lawyers are invariably more generous, fun to work with and, believe it or not, a hell of a lot less arrogant than doctors.

The only thing I miss about working in a doctor's office is my lab coat. If a designer would come up with a fashionable alternative to the lab coat for the non-medical environment, they would make a fortune. Why did I love the lab coat? Let me count the ways.

• We could get rid of those disgusting, ratty sweaters we have in our offices for when we get cold (you know you have one)
• Pockets for pens
• On “fat days”, we can hide our "Michelin Man" belly rolls
• On “bad wardrobe decision days” when we realize we don’t look as great as we thought we did when we left the house, we could throw on our trusty lab coat and hide our fashion faux pas
• Pockets to hide the candy we pilfer from our co-workers
• Pockets for Kleenex
• Pockets for tampons (no more skulking to the bathroom with our not-so-discretely hidden tampon in a file folder)
• On especially bad days, we could pull it over our heads and curl into the fetal position under our desks