The case that I'm working on here is big and complex and ugly, as described here. On Monday, we had some interrogatory answers due. Actually, they had been due 30 days earlier, but we got an extension. Interrogatories, as the name suggests, are questions asked by the parties during the discovery process. Imagine the final exam you have nightmares about, multiply it by 100, and that's what our interrogatories looked like. One question (out of about 40) had five subparts, one of which had 31 subparts. Not fun. Of course, unlike an actual final exam, you get to answer interrogatories in a very roundabout way, for instance by objecting to the scope or nature of the question, or by giving an answer along the lines of, "The answer to this question can be found in the documents in Bates number ranges 129808-129844, 125364-126003, and 145382-145887." In that case, of course, you don't actually give them the documents, but you wait until they ask for them, then you fight over whether you're sending them out or they're coming to look at them, then eventually someone actually sees the documents.

For the past four weeks the contract attorneys have been reviewing boxes that may or may not contain documents that answer these questions. They have coding sheets, and whenever they see a potentially relevant document, they take down basic information about the document and categorize it under about 15 topics with various subtopics. In theory, these coding sheets should be going right into a database, but one of our techies was off on vacation for a while, word processing has been uncooperative, and we've had to use the sheets for other processing purposes. So there's no database. On top of this, due to some strange breakdown in communication, we mis-Bates labeled our first 12,000 pages, and we only found this out last Monday. And, it was just the previous Friday that one of the firm's lawyers on the case actually let us know which of the categories on the coding sheet were relevant for answering these particular interrogatories. (You'd think our coding sheet would only contain categories we cared about. Unless you've worked in a law firm.)

So between May 2 and May 12 we had to hand sort every coding sheet to see if it contained categories we cared about, pull every document containing one or more of those categories from its box with a slipsheet showing where to put it back, get those documents to a lawyer upstairs, get them back, replace them in the box, renumber 12,000 pages, pull the relevant documents again for a second review, pull out some particularly interesting documents that we don't want to turn over just yet, re-review some of our early boxes where people weren't doing things right, and make sure through all of this that we didn't lose or misfile a single page. Also, we had to keep the attorneys going through boxes, check their boxes out and back in, try to do some of our regular ongoing work, fire Old Guy and Wacky Lady, and deal with the junior partner continuing to change his mind about every little thing every couple of hours.

That, my friends, is how The Beallsvonian ended up working the longest week of his life last week.

On Tuesday, after all this was done, I was a total zombie in the afternoon. I was practically catatonic in my chair. So I ended up leaving work two and a half hours early just to get some rest. I ended up on a crowded train where I couldn't get a seat for most of the trip. When I got to my car I couldn't face the 40-minute drive home yet, so I drove five minutes to a Starbucks and just crashed for a while instead.

The practical upshot of which was that I have now finished one more volume from The List. Ivan Doig's English Creek was another excellent read that snuck up on me--slow going for a bit, but about halfway in I became really transfixed. It's the story of Jick McCaskill, a 14-year-old Montana teen coming of age in the summer of 1939. His dad is a forest ranger in Northwest Montana, and he is surrounded by sheep and cow ranches. Jick feels out-of-touch with the adult world, but he's slowly coming into it, and he latches onto the idea that the more he can understand about history--not capital-H History, but a local understanding of where the people nearest to him have come from--the better he will come to understand the world into which he is growing. So it's a coming-of-age story and a Montana story, but it's also about family dynamics, as the central tension in the McCaskill clan is older son Alec's determination to lead his own life rather than the college future his parents have plotted for him.

What's so great about English Creek is the way Doig manages to anchor a strong personal story into a vivid setting that he understands with a historian's mind; the result is a grounded story that truly invokes how part of the rural West was taking baby steps out of the Great Depression, and how modern times slowly crept into a somewhat resistant countryside. I was really taken with this book, which is the middle novel of a trilogy, and I will definitely be picking up the third volume soon, and possibly more by Doig as well.