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Legal Helpers sign
The Legal Helpers Sign

Signage surrounds us. When we walk around a typical American commercial district, we're besieged by it. Restaurants announce their cuisine. Real estate and insurance companies hawk their goods and services. Dentists offer small amounts of short-term pain in exchange for a way out of long-term suffering.

And for the most part, it enters and leaves our systems like excess water, leaving no trace. In through the eyes, out through that invisible and near-infinite stream of information that the brain subconsciously processes and then discards.

But in Chicago, on the El, there's a sign of real power and potency. It's a little like the videotape featured in The Ring, except that you don't die within seven days of seeing it; instead, you become depressed within seven seconds.

Deeply depressed. Because this sign communicates in stark black and white, painting a tapestry of modern misery. Like a pirate flag in the days before the whimsical days of Gilbert and Sullivan, it's a banner of crushed hope.

Drained of color, the sign offers two services, and two prices. $500 if you'd like to declare bankruptcy. $200 if you'd like to get divorced. $500 if you'd like to admit that you're a ruined person, appealing to the state for protection of your few remaining assets, and giving up what little liquid cash you may yet have in order to tell the world that you've failed. $200 if you'd like to end a relationship that may have once been sanctified by love, by the law and by the blessings of God, but is now merely a mistake.

Good deal.

The sign doesn't implicitly say there'll be another human being to help you through your troubled times. It's the startlingly anonymous "Law Offices of Legal Helpers." Not Brown, Katzinski and Franken; not Davis and Davis, or Morgenstern and Sons, LLC. Just the "Law Offices of Legal Helpers."

"Over 20,000 clients," says the sign, guaranteeing that you'll be ground up into a gray paste along with the rest of a teeming, sad, defeated urban mob. "Clients" isn't in quotes, but you can feel them there. The punctuation somehow lurks in the background. The good prices and somber signage say you won't really be a client. You'll be a number. The sign really isn't deceptive; it speaks clearly, using black and white the way a stinging insect uses black and yellow.

The sign also promises that its services are advertised on TV. And you know when that is; late at night, when working people with jobs have already called it a night. If you're channel-surfing through the netherworld of local cable at 3:30 a.m., there's a good chance something is desperately wrong.

The Law Offices of Legal Helpers are there for you. There to help you end it — your fiscal solvency, your small business, your marriage, your life as you know it.

And there to totally bum out the rest of us, whose lives haven't yet melted down. Thanks, Legal Helpers. You've ruined my week. My attorney will be in touch.

James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)

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