Jim Halpert, sales associate at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. A title as unimpressive as the job he held, and he convinced himself daily that he only held said job at arm's length. “For now,” he would mutter to himself, as he bent over reams of paper, “this is just a job.”

But he had already melted into obedience, changing his wardrobe from the faded Levi's and California hoodies of college into Goodfellow and Co. button downs, ties, the whole set. He had 25% off coupons scrunched at the bottom of his wallet and the back of his desk drawers. His only sign of rebellion was an undone top button, which made his tie swing forty-five degrees to the left or right whenever he loped around the office.

What he lacked in appearances, he compensated for in delusion. The constant look of boredom in his green eyes concealed an active imagination. Today's plan was spectacular, even by his own standards: to finally meet the mother of Dunder Mifflin’s receptionist, Pam Beesly; to dazzle Mrs. Beesly with his charm; to make the aforementioned Pam see that Jim Halpert was the man she ought to love, and, shortly afterwards, for Pam to end her three-year engagement to Roy Anderson from Dunder Mifflin's warehouse.

In his defence, Pam's mother had indeed chosen to visit the lump of concrete otherwise known as Scranton Business Park. Pam mentioned this two days ago at break, her green eyes lighting up as she spoke. In his three years of knowing Pam Beesly, Jim had learned about her mother through Pam's affectionate descriptions.

“I have to pack,” she would say one Friday, “because I'm going to my parents', and they live two hours away.” Another day she might say, “My mom is still refusing to buy a Motorola.” Still another day, it would be, “My mom bought a whole tray of pink purple orchids in Dickson City.” One day Pam came in with a tin of macadamia nut cookies, courtesy, she said, of her mother.

And all of these tantalising details were punctuated by the same refrain: “I love my mom! OK, that's probably the most obvious statement ever!”

Jim enjoyed hearing her say it, though. He enjoyed her ecstatic smile, and the way she hunched her shoulders, as though embarrassed by her affection. He enjoyed the way her honey brown curls slid over her eyes, and those careless moments where, gesturing with her delicate hands, she accidentally brushed his forearm. That contact always made him forget to conceal the dazed affection in his eyes.

Honesty was dangerous at Dunder Mifflin, for camera men lurked everywhere.

Dunder Mifflin was the subject of a documentary, or at least the camera men said so. Jim had yet to find a single American willing to cough up $14.95 a month to watch bored salesmen pushing 50% recycled letter stock, knowing full well that Office Depot and Staples would run them all out of business.

The camera men were a constant menace, lurking in corners, skulking behind chairs, peering through blinds, hiding behind filing cabinets, and sliding through doors. Jim had learned to dread The Summons, in other words, a chubby arm that shot out of thin air (or so it seemed), a finger that curled, a gesture with the head towards the conference room. Interview time.

If Jim had believed in omens, then the beginning of that momentous day when Mrs. Beesly would arrive ought to have frightened him into common sense. His fellow sales associate, Dwight Schrute, was yet again clipping his fingernails and brushing them onto Jim's desk. Of course, Dwight claimed he was brushing them onto the floor-- yeah, right. As if that weren't sufficient, Jim then watched in quiet irritation as Dwight began shredding a wad of expired pricing lists.

Grrrrr! went the shredder. Dwight leaned back in his chair with a self-satisfied pout.

Jim leaned back too, clicked his pen, and willed himself to remain calm. “Can you not do that right now? I have to call a client.”

Dwight wore steel-rimmed glasses that made him resemble a guest on The Firing Line. He had dull blue eyes and could stare for well over a minute without blinking. Dwight held this as a sign of sincerity.

“It's called housekeeping, Jim. OK?” Dwight emphasised every consonant. “I need to concentrate, and I can't do that with last year's pricing lists sprayed everywhere. What do you mean, why did I keep them in the first place? In case I might need them. All right, so what if I never ended up needing them? I had to be sure in the first-- oh, just shut up. OK? I need to stay focused.”

At that point, wheels of trickery and mischief began turning in Jim's brain. He often kept himself entertained in this paper dungeon by devising pranks on Dwight.

But today, he was meeting Pam's mother, so revenge had to wait.

Ping! It was his inbox, or rather, his spam folder. He shook his head and continued searching his in-tray. Any email from his boss, Michael Scott, could wait.

But then Jim heard the door behind him open, and Michael Scott strolled out like a petulant child demanding a “yes” on the spot. Michael Scott, regional manager at Dunder Mifflin, spent a good portion of his day forwarding emails such as You Won't Believe What She Showed on Camera and Two Monkeys, One Cage. In the vague mists of Jim's memory, he recalled Dunder Mifflin's behavioural handbook prohibiting such messages between colleagues. If only Corporate had had the foresight to prohibit such messages from bosses to employees-- oh wait, they had.

Michael Scott just preferred to ignore it.

“Any emails today?” asked Michael, taking the liberty of sitting on Jim's desk. That was another aspect of Michael Scott's no-holds-barred managerial approach. Michael claimed to be friends with everyone in the office; he claimed to love them all, even.

“I don't think so,” Jim said, going through the motions of checking his inbox.

But Michael was persistent, and Jim surrendered by checking the folder he most wished to ignore. As suspected, Michael's email had nothing to do with selling paper. Fifty Signs Your Priest Might Be Michael Jackson.

Jim managed a polite smile, while Michael guffawed. “Well done. Topical.”

Nonetheless, Jim returned to work.

Then Todd Packer arrived. Todd Packer, the balding poster child for arrested development and, incidentally, or coincidentally, Michael's best friend.

Packer's head was like the pumpkin balloons Jim used to fill with candles on Halloween as a kid. But this pumpkin was so full of nonsense that the remaining strands of Packer’s dark hair had probably receded from shame, rather than age. Packer's voice sounded like the sputtering Ford Focus of Jim's decrepit next-door neighbour, who always ignored his “Check Engine” light. When Packer laughed, which happened far too often, Jim was reminded of screaming convicts on the electric chair.

Yee-hee-yoww-ha-ha!

True to form, Packer mobilised every facet of his stunted personality for today's performance. First, jokes about boning the elderly Mrs. Scott, then Packer treated the office to his electric chair laugh; then, after Michael made him calm down, Packer seized the chance to become useful.

“Oh! OK. Grade A gossip for you right now,” said Michael to Packer. “Randall, CFO, resigned. Nobody knows why.”

Packer, fancying himself the apostle charged with spreading the gospel of corporate malfeasance to Scranton, jumped in with faux outrage.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, likewise seated on Jim's desk. (No, he didn’t ask Jim first.) “Everyone knows why! You don't know?”

Silence greeted that question, but Jim, sitting behind the wall of navy suit and arrogance, otherwise known as Todd Packer, was finally interested. If Packer should appear now, like a pus-filled zit on someone's ass, a story was the least he could offer.

“OK,” said Packer, “check this out.”

Apparently, Mr. Randall had resigned because his bimbo secretary couldn't perform in bed, then squealed on him “just to be a bitch”. All of this, along with Todd Packer assuring everyone in Dunder Mifflin that women were dumb.

Michael Scott was getting high on laughter, Jim noted without surprise. Every so often, given a word here or a phrase there, the regional manager exploded into squeals of pretend outrage and exaggerated delight.

“Oh, wow!” said Michael. “What did I tell you about the bleep button?”

Of the many solutions Jim had devised to cure Packer of evil spirits, he felt trepanning would be most effective: there was a higher chance of death that way.

The camera crew, no doubt capturing Jim's thin lips and emotionless stare, ushered him into the conference room for another interview.

“Hey,” he told them, “what has two thumbs and hates Todd Packer? This guy!”

While the crew laughed, Jim's fake smile collapsed into a scowl.

In fact, the Scandal of Randall turned out quite different when later described in sanguine mumbles by Dunder Mifflin's HR rep, Toby Flenderson.

Toby was mild, so mild that his sandy brown hair was hardly distinguishable from his pale head; so mild that his tartan jacket, white shirt, and patterned tie could have been cut from the same material and pasted to his body. Who was to say that Toby Flenderson hadn't been born in work clothes? Toby's voice slid out of his mouth at a steady B flat, at least according to Dwight, who played guitar.

Jim eventually learned that Randall had pulled some moves on his secretary, got exposed (in more ways than one), then quit before he could be fired. Now Dunder Mifflin's senior managers had the shakes. Toby Flenderson, along with the other HR reps, were now chomping at the bit to replay their sexual harassment videos. Soon the employees of Dunder Mifflin Scranton would be seated in a ring like druids, chanting “Intent is Irrelevant” and promising not to screw each other without signing a disclaimer first.

“Well, well,” said Jim to himself, as he began plugging numbers into his calculator without thinking, “such is life.” He dealt with scandals the same way he dealt with expense reports: he kept his head down, and waited for them to blow away. Break was coming, and with it, he could turn his mind to the more pleasant matter of Mrs. Beesly.

He and Pam shared a round table in the kitchen. It wasn't a spoken agreement; it just happened. Or at least, he ensured that he always sat at the same table she did, and she never disputed it. Pam's back was to the door, so they had enough privacy, and Jim's back was to the fridge-- a slight disadvantage, but he had grown impervious to the constant waft of cold air whenever a colleague went to retrieve lunch.

This time, nobody was about.

“I'm really excited to meet your mom,” he told Pam.

She was in the middle of a Blommer dark chocolate bar, munching on square after square. Yet she gave him a slight frown of surprise, while smiling.

“You are?”

He did his best to temper his excitement, though he smiled back.

Pam seemed to accept this alleged decorum, otherwise the chocolate was too tasty for her to consider anything else. Surely it wouldn't cross her mind that this excitement sounded remarkably like that of Roy Anderson before he met Mrs. Beesly.

“I'm excited to show her around,” Pam said. After popping a square of chocolate into her mouth, she turned the wrapper ninety degrees anticlockwise.

Is there some logic to this? Jim wondered.

Once again, tufts of Pam's brown hair were hanging over her right eye, and Jim fought the urge to tuck them behind her ear. It would allow him to study her face more clearly, from the vague surprise lines on her forehead, to her petite nose that was dotted with freckles, down to her full cheeks when she smiled.

“She really wants to meet everybody.”

“Oh yeah?” He knew this already, but enjoyed feigning surprise. “Good, 'cos I have a lotta questions.”

Now Pam appeared serious, though Jim knew she was acting. But she was quite a different woman when not smiling. Errant strands of Pam's hair cast shadows on her face, making her cheeks look thinner. He saw laugh lines on both sides of her lips. He could count the lines on her forehead, if he so chose.

“Oh, really?” she asked, with sarcastic wariness.

But of course. For three years, Jim had known Pam, yet the number of questions he had about her only increased. Where did Pam get her smile from? He had never seen such pure delight on anyone's face before. Why did her eyes remind him of freshly cut emeralds? How had she learned to laugh with such abandon, a cross between a full belly cackle and a high-pitched giggle? Or, he could ask, in the manner of Shakespeare, whether Pam’s hair was golden brown, or some other shade. Who had endowed Pam with the warmest personality, that cut through his ennui and cynicism and filled him with hope?

Of course, he couldn't ask such questions, so he stuck with humour. “As a child, did Pam ever show any traits that would hint towards her future career as a receptionist?”

Pam had been about to devour another square of chocolate. Instead, she giggled quietly, her eyes fixed on his.

The Scandal of Randall continued terrifying all at the Scranton branch. Now the camera crew wanted the low-down on any office relationship, even though Toby had mildly forbidden them all. One camera man tapped Jim's shoulder again.

“May we ask a few questions?”

“For the love of God,” he muttered, as he followed the man for another interview, “these people are like the cops-- or the KGB.” But he made no audible complaint. He always agreed to things just to be polite.

“So,” said a beefy man in the conference room, swirling his polystyrene cup. “You heard the HR guy. ‘Office relationships are never a good idea.’ But you ain't following that, are ya?”

What? They had to be joking. Jim played dumb, watching the man's grey eyes bulge and his cheeks grow fatter. A thinner man stood behind the first, squinting, one eye glued to his camera. He too was smirking, revealing a gold canine. He looked like Jaws.

A couple of months ago, Thin Man had asked Jim about Katy Moore, his current girlfriend. Katy was a redhead who wore tight, low-cut cardigans and skirts that clung to her legs, flared at the bottom. She had thick red hair running past her shoulders, creamy skin-- well, that was how Dwight put it. And it was a cold day in hell if Jim had to borrow adjectives from Dwight Schrute to describe his own girlfriend. Katy Moore was everything he was supposed to want, especially judging by the Neanderthal leering and jokes of every male at Dunder Mifflin when she flogged glittery purses from the conference room desk.

So, he had Katy. Roy of all people had given him the idea, but Jim held off until forced to watch Roy tickle Pam, that is to say, run his sausage fingers all over Pam's delicate waist and under her striped shirt, right on Jim's freaking desk. (Why did everyone sit on his desk without permission?)

Yes, that mortifying display made him snap. Then, and only then, did he tear his eyes away from Pam’s demure shirts, the scandalous sight of her knees, the tantalising dip in her shirt collar. Then, and only then, did he recognise the existence of other women, and Katy didn’t mind showing more leg and more chest. So he turned on the charm, hands in his pockets and an “aw, shucks” smile. It worked.

It always did.

So, what other office relationship could he disclose, other than the one he shared with paper?

He broke eye contact, only to discover another bad sign. A strange visitor was in the conference room, splayed over two chairs. A non-human visitor with pink panties, cones for breasts, and lines presumably drawn in crayon to give her a face. Michael Scott had brought this peach and blonde monstrosity into the office earlier to prove a point. To decipher Michael's yells: explicit sexual jokes at work were not only acceptable, but necessary for maintaining freedom of speech. Following that, sexual harassment was an irrelevance.

Well, if Michael got to brush aside reality, then so would Jim.

“I'm in an office relationship,” he eventually said, pulling his best lovestruck expression. Wide eyes, raised eyebrows, soft voice. “It's special. She's nice, she's shy.”

He felt an uncomfortable twist in his stomach, but ignored it.

“She's actually here if you wanna meet her... Hold on one second.”

With a flourish, he dragged the poor topless doll next to him. The crew did laugh, especially when he pretended to insist that the doll put on a shirt. Then, their faces turned mischievous.

“But you do have an office relationship?” asked Jaws.

Did they really want to know about his long-term relationships with premium bond sheets, Papermates, Uniballs, No.2 pencils, and Manila file folders? Nobody knew more about the tonnage price of Manila file folders than he.

The crew chuckled at these remarks too, but weren't satisfied. As Jim was running out of gags, he simply gestured at the doll.

“I love her more than Manila though, so it's not cheating.”

No sooner than Jim returned to his desk did Michael storm in, raging against corporate, Toby, lawyers, Toby, injustice, and more Toby. Michael's brown eyebrows reminded Jim of a hawk. He would have laughed, had not Toby himself ambled into the bullpen, muttering apologies that nobody heard. Then the warehouse guys stomped in, grumbling. Jim winced at the odour of Lynx mixed with Alfredo’s pizza, as the unlikely group of men all made for the conference room.

The bullpen became quiet, for once. The ferns in their ceramic pots were supposed to provide calm, but some genius had only placed them outside the conference room and near reception. All he faced was a full in-tray and a spreadsheet waiting patiently for more figures. Order reconciliation-- a whole afternoon of it. Not for the first time did he eye his yellow No. 2 pencil and its sharp point. One stab in the neck, and he'd be out in the ER.

No. If he did that, he would miss Pam’s mother coming. And during his sexual harassment seminar, Toby had enjoined them all to act every day as though Pam’s mother were coming, oblivious to his colleagues’ laughter.

Speaking of whom, Pam was sequestered behind Reception. Yet again, part of her fringe covered her eyes, but she didn't brush it away. Jim watched her glance at the door with a hopeful expression-- green eyes lit up, the ghost of a smile-- but it all came to nothing. It was only Hank Doyle from lobby security who strolled in, a black man towering at six foot four with crispy grey coils for hair that could have come from a scrap iron heap; a man with a heavy brow, always about to complain that he was hard done by if you even said hello. All of this, complemented by the stoop of his shoulders in his navy bomber jacket and his marvellous John Lee Hooker voice, mean that Hank was about to deliver the mother of all complaints.

What Jim wouldn't give to mimic that voice!

“Now look here, Miss Pam,” said Hank, pointing at Pam's nose. “Tell that swaggering son o' a bitch that he needs ID and a companion before he can enter these premises.”

Hank said “premsees”.

“Tho' if you ask me,” Hank continued, “I'd 'a shredded his damn licence, misdemeanour or none. Those cops are pussies! 300 bucks and no suspension. Pussies!”

Ah, thought Jim. More of Todd Packer's malfeasances, DUI, hence why the temp, Ryan Howard, was forced to chauffeur him around Scranton.

Even though Pam nodded at this rant, Jim could tell she wasn't listening. She periodically gave Hank assurances, a “yes” here, an “of course” there, but her eyes were unfocused. When Hank slunk out, still cursing Scranton's puerile law enforcement, her expression changed from pretend interest to jaded concentration. She had sunk into a stupor, except Jim still heard her deft fingers tapping at her keyboard, and the printer behind whirring as it spewed out paper.

What a difference to the warm, instantly likeable Pam that appeared in the break room and kitchen, and shared mischievous grins with him during meetings!

The clock struck a minute past three. Jim felt his usual afternoon lethargy creeping up his spine and paralysing his shoulders. Three o'clock was the hour for slumping in his chair, tapping his pencil on his desk, and deciding after some pretend reluctance to visit Pam.

Three o'clock was also the hour when Dwight felt most productive.

“Nailed that sale,” he was muttering, after putting down his receiver. “Total fool didn't even realise how generous a discount I offered. Who said engineers were smart? This one sounded like a bum, not unlike a certain junior sales associate I know.”

Dwight gave Jim a severe look.

But even that provocation wasn't enough, and Dwight soon found that Jim ignored all of his other snide remarks as well. This made Dwight suspicious, and a suspicious Dwight became three hundred times more irritating. A suspicious Dwight muttered what sounded like incantations by Saruman; he pushed his files around, flipped his Rolodex, craned his neck over Jim's in-tray, and opened and slammed his drawers.

At this, Jim rubbed his mouth, feeling his irritation grow. He'd make Dwight pay for all of this-- but later.

Pam's mother was coming.

And that, he realised, meant a change in attitude. No more IM messages with a winking emoji, no checking out her FreeCell progress (or rather, checking her out as she played FreeCell), and, sad to say, no discussing pranks on Dwight. After all, Pam had insisted earlier that everyone refrain from making lewd jokes in Mrs. Beesly's presence. How much more so for rude jokes about a co-worker?

Pam was now shifting in her chair. Jim liked to think that she too had caught three o'clock lethargy, that they were suffering in silence and must, at some point, come together to recover. He had already hired Pam for resuscitation in the event that he died of boredom. But today, it looked like she was in her last moments, for she yawned, then quickly covered her mouth. Jim saw the gemstone on her engagement ring flash, and it made his heart drop an inch. Quickly, he returned to the paper scattered across his desk. Pricing lists, purchase orders, sales reports, leads, contracts... Just looking at the sheets made his brain turn to mush.

But he had enough presence of mind to remember all the other things he couldn't mention in Mrs. Beesly's presence. All those inexplicable moments that he had shared with Pam, like a smile from her which, at least in his desperate imagination, lasted too long. It might be Pam's wistful comments about how Roy cared nothing for watercolours, or how sometimes, she just didn't get him at all.

Or the fact that at this year's Dundies Awards, Pam had given him a drunken kiss on the lips in front of everyone else. Yet neither he nor Pam had ever spoken of it since.

Or the moment might be playful tussles which made Pam issue a full belly laugh, until she would grow serious, pull away, and leave him paralysed with hurt and guilt.

For three years, Jim had been spinning down a hill like Saint Catherine, buoyed only by the winds of hope. Until now.

Mrs. Beesly was the destination. One scene with her, and he would proceed to Act Three of this tragicomedy as a hero.

“Um, hello,” said a female voice at reception.

Jim looked up. The woman by reception had straight red hair fulling just under her chin and a modest fringe. Her eyes were a lively brown, and she wore an orange cardigan over an orange top. Cardigan logic, Jim realised, as this was one of Pam's mottos. She mentioned the phrase several times on phone calls. Make the cardigan match the top, or something. And while Pam loved cream and baby pink, this woman was bolder.

Pam was rarely bold, but on seeing the woman, she burst into delighted laughter, and an “Oh my God!”, rushing to hug her.

I want that, Jim realised. He wanted to stand in a kitchen, watching Mrs. Beesly bake macadamia nut cookies while Pam leaned against a counter, gushing about her watercolours. He could even picture the casement window where Pam would plant flowers, for he had often caught her secretly reading The American Gardener September/October edition instead of answering the phone.

“Is this all yours?” he heard Mrs. Beesly ask.

“Yeah,” said Pam, “I'm in charge of all of this.”

In charge? Never before had Jim heard Pam describe her job without a dejected sneer. Was that actual pride in her voice? Confidence?

He knew regrettably little about Pam's life before Dunder Mifflin, but he revelled in every fact gleaned about her personality. Too often he saw a jaded look in her green eyes, the shade of hazel leaves that have seen too little sunlight.

From time to time, Pam’s eyes lit up, and Jim would treasure hope that she recognised the comfortable façade of her current life, that she suspected a different world existed outside Dunder Mifflin’s walls. But those signs vanished as quickly as they appeared when Pam turned to her computer. Six on seven for Freecell, switching a six for a seven in Sudoku, six then seven dots in Mahjong.

A triumphant day it was when Pam would boast of her high scores, and he smiled at the smokescreen created by her words. But the truth weaselled its way out; Jim had lost count of the number of times that Pam traipsed to his desk with a guilty smile. “I’m bored.” Or, in the break room, “It’s not many little girls’ dream to be a receptionist,” and she’d stare into her Lipton black tea as though she had dropped her life inside.

And all this didn't even account for her feelings about Michael Scott, who had just strolled out of his office, holding the topless doll. He disappeared round the corner that led to the main door, and returned empty-handed. Mrs. Beesly looked mystified; Jim was barely surprised.

Even that interruption didn't stop Pam from explaining her duties like she worked at the Pentagon.

“So,” she was saying, her soft voice animated, “somebody calls in, then I assign the client to a salesman based on the weekly rota. And I also get to...”

Good for her, Jim thought. Good for Pam to have one day without self-deprecation. One day where she wasn't ostensibly proud of the wrong things, yet dismissive of the right ones. Like the day where she revealed that Roy took out an ad in The Scranton Times to propose. Jim had stared, cleared his throat and remained silent; Pam declared in a forced, optimistic tone that Roy’s thriftiness was romantic.

At that very moment, Pam was using the word “thrifty” to describe Dunder Mifflin's attitude towards printers, copiers, and fax machines.

“...so if it doesn't work, I just nudge or kick the thing.”

Mrs. Beesly laughed.

Now that was the real Pam Beesly. Jim occasionally caught glimpses of her. He discovered her inner doodlebug quite by accident. She’d been shading contours around the slim white petals of a flaxleaf stiff aster, oblivious to her telephone ringing and the red light on her printer. Her fringe hung over her face, and she had Primsacolor oil pencils scattered around her in a halo. Jim had been transfixed, torn between watching her lost in her own world and his desire to intrude.

Grrr. Pam's shredder was now chewing up paper. Funny how the sound that so infuriated him whenever Dwight chose to shred his documents sounded like Mozart when Pam did the same.

“This is where I used to keep my computer,” said Pam. She had now moved to face the wall behind her desk.

Suddenly, Jim had to interrupt. Pam's liveliness, so rarely displayed at Dunder Mifflin, drew him like a moth to a flame. His vision of that imaginary kitchen grew stronger and stronger, with its accompanying aromas of cookie dough, fresh aster blooms, and the laundry detergent Pam used; the sound of Pam's soft, yet animated voice floated through the air and filled him with long-sought contentment.

He had to reach Pam's desk, had to present himself, had to show Mrs. Beesly that he belonged to Pam's future, not just lingering in her present and wishing he were her past too. Let Mrs. Beesly see just how well he and Pam fit together, the banter, the laughter, and, dare he say it, the affection.

This imagined scene filled him with greater and greater confidence. He smiled, even at the camera crew hovering nearby. As he strolled to Reception and took a jelly bean, hope welled in his chest like waves before they crash onto the shore.

Then the office door opened.

Roy Anderson.

The warehouse crewman had combed and oiled his rough brown hair, and wore it slicked back. He had exchanged his grey Dunder Mifflin shirt and faded Levi’s for a Coogie and slacks.

Like a prisoner on his way to Death Row, Jim returned to his desk. The jelly bean in his mouth now tasted like a thumb tack.

Well, what did you expect? he asked himself. You don't get to meet the parents if the girl goes home with her fiancé. Right?

“Hey, handsome!” he heard Mrs. Beesly exclaim.

It hurt. He tried not to look, but gave in, only to see Mrs. Beesly throw her arms around Roy, and it hurt. Who was he kidding? Roy had effectively joined the family already. All the excitement and wild hope that Jim had nurtured over the past few days meant less than Dunder Mifflin's commitment to fighting sexual harassment. He knew that, so why did he ever dream otherwise?

“So,” said Mrs. Beesly, oblivious to Jim's thoughts, “are we ready for dinner?”

Well, wasn't that just peachy? After a day of imagination, how comforting to discover that it had all been for nought; Mrs. Beesly would have been busy even if Roy hadn't just entered. No tour around the office, no meeting Pam's colleagues. Fancy driving here for two hours, just to be whisked away in Roy's Dodge Ram!

“Actually,” said Pam, “I kind of have to stall for a bit. But that's OK, as I'm very used to killing time.”

Mrs. Beesly and Roy laughed. For once, Jim didn't blame them, although he couldn't share in their mirth.

“I'm gonna wait, in the parking lot,” said Roy. “What kind of tunes do you want for the ride? Classical-- or oldies?”

“Anything is fine,” said Mrs. Beesly.

So Pam's mother was a music junkie. So was Pam. Happy was the evening when Pam asked for one of Jim's earphones, correctly deducing that he new music. He and Pam would bop their heads, standing close, and he longed for her to look straight into his eyes.

But of course, Mrs. Beesly would share her music with Roy instead.

The office door swung shut, taking both Roy Anderson and Jim's dreams. Still, he had suffered enough disappointment to know there was always a tarnished silver lining... somewhere. Pam was still there. Her presence, even in his periphery, was the difference between near-total and total dejection. Pam was there. It had to be enough. No point hoping for more.

“So which one is Jim?”

What? Mrs. Beesly had just whispered, but Jim caught every word.

“Mom!” Pam sounded like a mortified teenager. Was she squirming?

“I just wanted to know!”

The jelly bean in Jim's mouth turned sweet. He couldn't move or think, but he could smile with restrained delight. All the numbers, squares, and headings on his order consolidation forms seemed to dance around the page as though they too celebrated this stupendous plot twist.

Mrs. Beesly knew him, wanted to meet him-- had probably even seen him.

This was all Pam's doing, yet she never said a word! Night after night, he drove home, convinced that his yearning for an engaged receptionist was hopeless. And yet the whole time, Pam was gabbling to her mother about one Jim Halpert! Not Roy Anderson, but Jim Halpert.

Mrs. Beesly had never visited Dunder Mifflin Scranton, or at least not during the three years that Jim had worked there. So did that mean Pam had been discussing him for three years?

He was becoming giddy now. The fact that Pam seemed to make more noise than usual with her “organisation” completely escaped his notice.

What had she been saying? Good things; they had to be good things. No mother wanted to meet a man that her daughter despised. To hear the excited curiosity in Mrs. Beesly's voice was a compliment beyond all description, and Jim's heart beat so fast that he hardly breathed.

At reception, Pam was opening and closing drawers. “I just have to organise these papers…” she said in a harried voice.

Pam raved about him. Yet Jim had no way of knowing what she said, and he couldn't betray the fact that he'd overheard this conversation. Pam would be mortified, a further incentive to clam up and return to her cold signals.

She had looked wary earlier when he proposed asking Mrs. Beesly a ton of questions! Warm, open, affectionate Mrs. Beesly might have spilled the beans: “My daughter talks about you all the time!”

Oh, to have seen Pam's face then!

This was a sign. He and Pam belonged together, even if it crossed the line. Corporate would disapprove, and Toby would make him sign a disclosure form. But so what? He had to be the first man in history to have met a girl's parents without ever receiving a formal introduction. No business policies could overturn that accomplishment, especially if it came with Mrs. Beesly's indirect seal of approval.

The funny thing was, he hadn't even needed an introduction in the first place. Pam had made one on his behalf, entirely without his knowledge.

Maybe he was in an office relationship after all.