When I’m working on deposition prep \u2014 and I do and will recommend that you plaintiffs do a lot of this work\u00a0\u2014 I often get too tuckered out by the end of the day to get my own dinner together.<\/p>\n
A week ago, I came home from my lawyer’s office, where I’d been compiling and copying\u00a0 deposition exhibits. Really tiring work: I was standing virtually all day, moving between the conference room table and the xerox machine. My back and neck ached; I couldn’t imagine cooking.<\/p>\n
So I headed to Grand Sichuan<\/a>, not the nearest neighborhood Chinese restaurant but without question the best, and ordered for take-out two dishes which, as it happened, fed me for several subsequent dinners. (No, I didn’t get the soup dumplings. I’m sure you have to eat them at the restaurant for maximum ecstasy.)<\/p>\n Several days later, I noticed the two fortune cookies sitting on my counter, still sealed in their crinkly envelopes. I opened them, on the theory that, hey, they’re right in front of me so why not?<\/p>\n One fortune was not memorable. And at first I thought the second was equally trite. But then I read it again:<\/p>\n Patience is the key to joy.<\/em><\/p>\n The book I’m working on is called The Joy of Suing<\/em>. And I had just finished doing scrupulous, detailed, finicky work on piles of documents and logs and a time line of my lawsuit.<\/p>\n Although a few days later I walked out of a small market because the food prep guy wasn’t instantly available to butter a bagel, i.e., I am not a particularly patient person, it occurs to me that in the context of litigation, at least, patience is indeed the path to joy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I’m working on deposition prep \u2014 and I do and will recommend that you plaintiffs do a lot of this work\u00a0\u2014 I often get too tuckered out by the end of the day to get my own dinner together. … Continue reading