Present Company Excepted, Of Course

Over the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of work for my step-dad at his law office. General office stuff like typing and filing and printing out raffle tickets for the almighty annual charity Golf Tournament, which is vitally important to his law practice but not important enough to merit real raffle tickets.

The filing mostly involves taking the 4 and 5 lb stacks of loose paper that decorate his office and assembling some orderly, legal-looking files out of them. This seems mainly to consist of putting millions of printed-out emails into chronological order, double-hole punching them, and using these deadly praying-mantis-like prongs to attach them to one side of a file folder.

This process - finding dates, putting them in chronological order, and putting them in the appropriate files - has allowed me to watch cases evolve and devolve, as it were. I put them in order from the end to the beginning, then flip them over and file them from the beginning to the end. I can see all the back-and-forth and the arguing and the stupid pointless discussion that happens before concluding a case. And, more than any single other thing, this process has reminded me of something I've always believed.

People are stupid.