You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
My job.
I’m not saying it’s crazier than yours.
But it might be.
High Stress. Multiple fast paced deadlines. A what have you done for me attitude that begins almost the minute you arrive for work. It’s a job where the pressure is from the inside out, and the outside in.
Everyone is a critic because of how you look, how you sound, what you said, what you didn’t say.
I was reminded of the pressure cooker of the job tonight as I sprinted out the door to interview a cop who caught a bad guy.
At 1st glance, so what, right?
That’s a cop’s job. Well it is, but these cops were eating lunch. They looked out the restaurant window and saw a woman sprinting through traffic toting two big shopping bags.
The officers dining, got up from the table and gave chase. They sprinted across traffic and caught the woman, a shoplifter who was running with 800 dollars of new merchandise.
Turns out the woman is a wanted felon from Memphis and the fugitive task force is very interested in her.
The cops who gave chase said “sure we’ll talk to you.”
So I’m on the interstate, I’m almost there.
Then the phone rings.
I hate when the phone rings.
It’s abrupt, jarring, like a hand grenade rolled in front of a moving convoy.
Will it blow? How bad is it going to be? Can we escape injury?
These are the things that go though my mind.
I push the answer button.
“You want what?” I say into the receiver.
I stare out the window. I see trucks and cars condensing from three lanes into two.
I am only partially listening to the voice on the other end.
The voice is the hand grenade. It has been tossed under my car and it is now abruptly and angrily changing my life.
I should expect it. What have you done for me lately is what have you done for me right now.
I hang up.
“What?” my partner asks.
“Law suit filed in a big case.”
“So?”
I don’t answer. I shake my head. The voice on the other end didn’t really have any ideas on how to proceed. The voice on the other end only knew to stop the progress of my current task.
As my partner looks for a safe way to turn around, to stop, to head to something untested and new, I think bout Newton’s first law of motion.
An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
I think that it was hard to find this story. It was hard to get to this story in rush hour traffic. Now we are stopping, changing course, altering our vector, heading back for a new assignment filled with questions and uncertain gravitational inertia.
“It’s 4:30 pm,” my partner says, maneuvering to an off ramp to turn around. “Who we gonna talk to.”
I stare out the window and look at a billboard with a plane landing somewhere with a palm tree.
I am tempted to open the door and just exit at highway speed.
After 20 minutes of stop and go traffic that is taking us nowhere good, we return to the mother ship.
I walk in the door and I’m handed a 100 page legal brief.
It’s heavy, thick, loaded with legal ease, like it took someone with a law degree a long time to write it.
I don’t know the case. I certainly don’t know the law.
I hold the heavy document and stare at the people who handed it to me.
I wonder if they know what this document says. I wonder if they have even looked at it, digested it, thought about how much is contained in this 2 inch thick ream of legal briefs.
As I move to a large table where I can spread out the massive document, I wonder how easy it is to hand someone a massive court brief and then turn away without a care in the world thinking about driving home, and making dinner, and picking up the kids from day care.
It’s hard to read when you are angry. It’s hard to process when you are angry. It’s hard to digest legal ease when you are a civilian.
I sit down and take a deep breath and begin reading.
Page 1. A thriller.
Motion to dismiss.
Oh My God.
I can barely get through the title of this collection of legal vomit.
I push on, trying to take notes. I make yellow highlight marks on words that seem important.
They are not important.
All I think about is that palm tree and the airplane and anyplace other than this place.
So I read on and it’s laborious. It’s like chewing sand. It’s like giving yourself a bikini wax with an angry wolverine.
Words like motion to dismiss and summary judgment fill the page.
“Ain’t exactly a Tom Clancy Novel, ” I say to nobody in particular.
People come up to me and ask what I’m doing.
I show them the 2 inch thick legal brief.
Like it’s a festering boil that is oozing puss, they seem to understand. They smile or say sorry and walk away from me like I have lepracy.
I turn another page. It rolls off my fingertips like bricks falling off a truck.
Sentence after sentence burns my soul, contaminates my brain.
As I read, it feels like a dust bowl in my eyes.
I try to find the common theme in this quagmire of filth and lies and truth and obfuscation.
It is buried under 100 pages of legal parlance and motions and twisted court room B.S.
The system is wrong, I think to myself. The system is a GPS device with no satellite coverage constantly screaming
“Recalculating”.
Though in the court system, recalculating means more motions, more paper, more time and money wasted.
I call the D.A.’s office.
“We won’t try this in the media,” I’m told.
I call the defense attorney who wrote this unholy piece of filth.
“Now’s not a good time. I was sleeping,” he actually says.
Were you sleeping when you wrote this, I feel like asking.
I call a number of other sources at 5:30 pm on a Monday night.
Tick Tock.
Go to hell their unanswered phones seem to say.
2 hours later, I have read 20 plus pages.
There are dozens and dozens more, including exhibits galore.
“Enough.” I say pushing away from the table.
If I can’t figure out how to boil this 100 page court paper into a 75 second story then I’m in the wrong business
“In the wrong business,” I say it out loud and laugh.
Maybe I am?
I walk by the newly painted men’s room door.
It seems to speak to me. The door is grey and the wet paint sign hanging sideways, covering the men’s sign
For some reason the guy who painted the door is the envy of my moment.
How much stress did that guy have?
Grey. Blue Grey? Dark Grey? Greyish Grey?
Did he use a fine brush? A thin Brush?
Did he care more than the guy holding 2 inches of legal barf?
I walk down the hall.
I have spent the better part of 6 hours reading and synopsizing a court brief and then editing it into an understandable nugget.
Can I do it?
Absolutely.
Do I want to keep doing this?
I stare in the mirror.
The answer use to be easier to find.
Now I see lines around my eyes and a labor of love that just seems like labor.
“Hey the other guys are showing your story,” someone screams, expecting me to sprint somewhere to compare.
I don’t care. I go to the lunch room and pour myself a cup of coffee.
I need to feed my brain some high-octane juice to get it excited.
I sure hope my brain cares. The rest of me, sort of feels like it’s going through the motions.
Motion to Dismiss?
I wonder if I need to hire the lawyer who wrote this vomit to help me plan the next phase of my life?
Life’s Crazy™