Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Keeping the Parties Straight is Half the Battle

Often, I love my job. It can get stressful and annoying, like any other job, but seriously, I can't think of any other place I could work that would have the equal measures of drama and comedy.

Just the other day, a woman comes to the door of our conference room, and asks, as people do a hundred times per day, "Has my case been called?"

One of my co-workers began the endless process of trying to get out of her which of the 200 cases on the docket was "hers."

"Are you the defendant?"

"What?"

"Do you have charges against you today?"

"Huh?"

This is the point at which I usually get thoroughly exasperated and turn the whole mess over to someone else. This time, the woman got exasperated first:

"Look," she said, in a tone that clearly showed she thought we were all totally dense, "I'm the VICTIM . . . NOT the vic-TOR."

Oh, yeah. Courtroom comedy. I couldn't make this stuff up.