Today I put on a button-down shirt (!) and a tie (!!) and sat through an interview with my boss for the job I’ve already got and which, he has assured me flatly, is mine, period.

This is what is known as a formality.

The only thing that is not a mannered step along this smooth and pre-determined path is the salary I asked for.

Explanation: I have been temping at my place of employment (or, as my boss would say, I have been deployed as a strategic contract worker) for about nine months now. The company for which I have been working maintains an (apparently) strict policy wherein a given person may only work as a temp for a (not necessarily consecutive) total of one year. After that, it’s get hired or get out.

And so here I am: a strong employee carrying, at this point, some unique knowledge and a unique-within-the-department skillset for acquiring and developing that branch of knowledge. Nine months in, three months of viability before I’m out on the street.

Unless I get hired on a permanent employee. So there’s a question: how much do I need this job, and how much does this job need me?

And so I wrote down a number, and the number is higher than I think he’ll want to pay me, and certainly higher than the base salary for the position—but then, I’ve got a hell of a running start on the actual requirements of the position (I’ve been doing it, and well, for close to a year). And on top of that I’m doing development work that, as far as I can tell, no one else in the department knows how to do, and which would require significant retraining of another employee (or much-increased dependency on IT, and an attending reduced flexibility in getting development done) should I disappear from the picture.

To what degree that will be acknowledged in the salary dickering that I anticipate will follow, I don’t know. I wrote down a number that I am worth—there is no question in my mind, there, it was not what I would call a bluff—but flexibility is a valuable doctrine, and the exchange of reward now for greater reward later should not be roughly dismissed as a tactic.

In other words, we’ll see what happens.