As you may know, I have spent most of my working life working with attorneys as a legal secretary and paralegal.

Currently, I work (from home) as a legal word processor.

I pretty much love my work, especially my current work.

I get to type up stuff and make it pretty.

Then it goes away – I don’t have to worry about deadlines or calendaring, I don’t have to worry about getting the document filed or served.  It just goes away.

Sometimes a document comes back.

I (generally) hate that.

I hate that because (generally) it means I fucked it up somehow.

Or the attorney fucked up all the prettiness I had worked so hard on.

But such is life.

However, I worked on a huge document – that was the spawn of another huge document.

It took me hours and hours to create this document, even though it was, basically, cutting and pasting from one huge document to create the two other huge documents.

In this case, the other side wasn’t happy with our responses to their requests that we produce certain documents.  They weren’t even happy with our amended responses; and so they took us to court demanding that the court order us to do better.

In response, we had to prepare (or rather, I had to prepare) a document that set forth the requests in question, our response, our amended response, why the other side was not happy, and then the attorney filled in why the other side was full of it for asking for more out of us.

I must admit, this document was a thing of beauty – over 100 pages long – and per the court’s requirements set up in one massive table, with the content I had to fill in garnered from 5 different documents.

The hearing was held and now the attorney tells me the court had ordered us to provide further responses to 26 of the requests.

Fuck.

I’m thinking, wow, this meant that only 5 of the total requests did not require further response.

So I now have to prepare a document that includes the original request, our original response, our amended response, and put in a header and space for the attorney to fill in the additional response.

The good news is all this information exists in that 100+ page document I had already done.

The bad news is the formatting for this document is totally different.

Oh well, this is why I get the “big” bucks, right?

So, like I said, I spent hours and hours on this.

Send it to the attorney, and expect to never see it again.

Then I get an email from the attorney’s secretary – saying “oopsie”.

Turns out we did not lose big time at the hearing, we only needed to provide additional responses to 5 requests.

Can you guess which 5?

Yup, the 5 that the attorney had said do NOT need further response.

So the attorney’s original instructions were exactly the OPPOSITE from what the court’s order actually said.

Oopsie?  OOPSIE?

WTF?

The attorney read a court order and got it totally BACKWARDS?

WTSF?

So all that work was for NOTHING?

Fuck me.

So it took me less than a half hour to prepare the (hopefully now) correct documents.

And then people want to know why I’m such a crabby fat old lady.

I am a crabby fat old lady because …

Attorneys.