I'M A BIG WUSS . . .

I worked late tonight. Rather, I should say that I worked "late" tonight. And I'm tired! WHINE.

Actually, my 11-hour day was strangely invigorating. When I was a legal assistant at a big white-shoe law firm, it was BAD BAD BAD if you left the office before 8:00pm. (Actually, I think that was because everyone wanted to take advantage of billable dinner and town car transportation home, which only kicked in if you worked until at least 8:00pm.) We kept sleeping bags, changes of clothes, and bags of toiletries at the office, and hoped to God that someone would say "thank you" to us to make it all worthwhile. Come to think of it, it was worthwhile because my year there paid for my first year of law school in its entirety. When I was a paralegal in the D.A.'s office, we were strictly on a 9-to-5 schedule. At 4:55pm every afternoon, we lined up at the clock to punch our cards out exactly at 5:00pm. It became a sport, to see who could punch out closest to 5:00pm, down to the second. In fact, you had to apply to our supervisor to work later than normal; you wouldn't get paid for it otherwise. When I interned after my first year of law school, I was again strictly 9-to-5, which was totally fine by me since the job wasn't all that interesting. When I was at the U.S. Attorney's Office before I graduated law school, I was fortunate enough to be immediately be placed on a trial team. I routinely worked until midnight and on weekends and loved every single moment of it, except for the week that security told us to be extra careful because of suspicious crank phone calls that members of the trial team were receiving.

But those weren't "real" jobs, where I had "real" responsibility. There were always tons of people around to check my work, my research, my multitudinous copying jobs. The things I did made no difference in people's lives, and impacted hardly at all upon the reputation of my bosses or supervisors. Today, however ... Hooch and I held people's very lives in the balance. Granted, we are totally sick of this case and are of the determination that it should have disappeared eons ago. Alas, it remains before us, and has given us cause for much agitation, laughter, crows' feet from squinting at the computer's WestLaw pages, and guffaws of disbelief at the issues that have arisen in the past week. And even so, it was fun. I came THIIIIIIS close to dropping the ball in a major way several times, and each time, Hooch rescued me with her Grand Law Brain. And each time we came back in from the proceedings, we dropped our jaws at each other and rolled our eyes, for truly, that was all that was needed to express how we felt. And we flipped through books and thought up lyrical ways to say something really harsh and made up fake law that WE think should exist.

And then, when we stepped outside to our cars, it was dark. Wow.

I'm so tired now. I am such a wuss. She works an extra three hours and the poor thing is TIRED. But it's all good ... now, Hooch and I know all sorts of things about all sorts of things, and one day, we will compile our wisdom into one handy-dandy volume for all of you. And we will sell nary a copy, but sit smugly in our chairs and giggle at our apparent wit, as we reminisce upon days like today, when we heard the words "take a leak" come forth from El Jefe's mouth, and we fell over in shock.