When I woke up this morning, I thought about staying home to work on my oral arguments for the evening and on the related motion brief that is due Sunday night. But then I remembered that today was the day the routine increase in hippy density in several places in the country was going to drive the Bush regime from office. I figured if I stayed home, I’d just end up getting my guns cleaned and ready for the anarchy, so I might as well go to work. Plus that’s what the hippies called for, everyone to stay away from work and school. And I knew if I called my boss and asked to use a vacation day, he wouldn’t believe that I wasn’t going to cause trouble in the lefty ranks. He’s always worried about me going to jail, and I’ve never even been close to being arrested – I’m deceptively fast, and the cops usually get disheartened when they realize they haven’t picked the easy one to catch.
Then I realized that since I had to wear a suit for oral arguments, I had to take the car on the ferry. Because I won’t wear a suit to the lab, can’t carry it on my motorcycle, and won’t carry it on the bus because I don’t want mucus and bus stink on it. Car driving days are generally no good.
So I crammed in the rest of preparation for my orals into the ferry ride to Seattle, lunch, and the hour or so between work and the argument. At work I had to deal with a microfiche machine. Ridiculous. It’s like I’m in the 70’s. Well, except for the laptop connected to it to turn slides into Acrobat files.
You see, all of my research is so invaluable to the continued well being of mankind that they take my notebooks offsite to Castle Greyskull or the top of the Space Needle or some damn place for storage after I fill them up with my brilliant scientific thought. In the extremely likely event that I’d like to see something that I already did, they give me microfiche copies of the notebook. When the archivist handed me the packs of microfiche I must have looked at her like she was nuts.
I didn’t request the records of Watson and Crick from the 50’s when they determined the structure of DNA, I want my stuff from 2005 – the age of the microprocessor.
She told me that I could scan the fiche and make it a pdf file. When I asked her why they bothered scanning the file to fiche, so I could get it from her, walk to the fiche reader, log into a laptop, scan the fiche into the computer to make a pdf file when they could have just scanned it into a pdf file and put it on the network in the first place, I might as well have been asking a third century pope if the earth revolved around the sun.
Of course, the scanner didn’t capture the whole page. – Hey, who needs to know if that’s 10 M cyanoborohydride 10 mM cyanoborohydride? What’s the worst that can happen? Besides death of everyone within 20 feet of the fume hood? – So I sat at the machine for an hour transcribing my notes until my eyes were watering from the backlit white on black. I can’t wait to have a secretary.
Then at 4:00 when I changed into my suit people acted like I was walking around naked. People were being paged from other floors on other wings and even across the street to come look at me. I have been to the Christmas party, so people have seen me in a suit even though I never really interviewed for either of my jobs at work (long story). Only a few people knew why I was wearing a suit, so I had fun making up stories to tell the others. I told Hippie Lady that I was in a suit so I could assume power when they drove Bush out of office, and what was she doing at work anyway? Then I decided it’s only fun to tell stories like that in bars to good looking women when you’re single, so headed to school.
Since I was the state to Not-So-Hot-Lady-Classmate’s defense, the other two were there watching. I guess they called a meeting and decided to forgive me for my t-shirt transgression. Actually I think they were just in awe of some of my other qualities in my thousand-dollar suit. (That’s right, I paid a thousand bucks for a suit. I store it in a hermetically sealed container and break it out for things like playing lawyer.)
We all snickered at the professor in her judicial robes.
I went first and made a good case for throwing Stephanie’s scumbag client in the can. (Why can’t being a prosecutor pay more? Why!?) She did her spiel, but half-way through I started thinking about how the motion brief is going to kill me this weekend, so when I went up for rebuttal and Judge Professor asked me to respond to something she said, I had no freaking idea what she had said. Of course 93% of this is bullshitting, so I think I got out of it in decent shape. I’ll have to pay better attention on December 1, when I do this in front of REAL judges from the Washington Appellate court.
I don’t think I’ve ever said this about any class at any level of my academic career, but all I want to do is get a B and get the hell out of there.
After it was over, HLCM-1 gave me a half-hug and told me “good job.” All right, lady, hand’s off the merchandise, someone else bought it. I have no problem if you’d like to lease it, but you’ll have to inquire with the owner.
Then it was time for Constitutional Law. I don’t know what happened, but that class has quickly degraded into Scalia, Bush, Fox News, and South Carolina bashing. (Don’t worry, I don’t get the South Carolina thing and I’m IN the class.) I tried to restore a little order by defending Scalia’s dissent, but the case was pretty boring.
Then down to the ferry. I was 30 minutes early, so I decided that an apple and walnut thing at McDonalds was in order. A lady and her kid each carrying an “Impeach Bush” sign were there. They must have been the only protestors that would eat at McDonalds.
I’m tired, so I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m not. I’m not…
“Don’t tell me you took your kid out of school for this idiocy.”
“He’s learning how to be socially responsible…”
“Bullshit. Responsible people go to work instead of meaningless protests. I bet his daddy the lawyer went to work today. You wouldn’t be able to buy many McDLTs if he skipped work to dick around at the Federal Building.”
Two notes here: 1. Yes, I actually said “McDLT” even though the last McDLT was sold before that kid was born. 2. I didn’t know his daddy is a lawyer, but they were in expensive clothes and headed towards Bainbridge, so there is a 98% chance.
Then a state trooper asked me to take it easy.
Now I’m on the ferry and some Jesus Hippies returning from the proteset are in the front singing hymms. I’ve been on the ferry probably 2000 times, and I’ve never seen this. It’s amusing to watch the people flee from them. One lady tried to get a state trooper to stop them, by invoking the First Amendment. (The same trooper from McDonalds. I wonder if he was sent to watch me.) I’m not sure how singing about God on a ferry somehow equals Congress establishing a national religion, but the trooper told her to get lost, robbing me of a chance for more amateur lawyering.
Mercifully this day is at an end. Tomorrow will be much better – a trip to the dentist to finish a crown.
