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A Dele-gate situation.
Dec. 18th, 2018 07:18 pmThirteen days to go in what has been among my busiest work years ever. Most of it has been fairly short and sweet for a lot of different people- no multi-day trials or depositions or document dumps to sort out- but I have two major practice areas and two not-so-major ones, covering both cities I've worked in all 30-plus years and many of the counties surrounding them. They range from the lowest town court to the second highest appellate court in the state system, and even more bankruptcy appearances, mostly in one court, but in at least five different locations.
So it's not unusual for the occasional time conflict to come up. Even our one Bankruptcy Court has no controls over double-booking, but usually I'm able to sort things in time. That's what has resulted in my singing the theme song from this much-beloved album:
Two things to blame for this, other than my own brain cells: a broken computer and a dead president.
----
Conflicted Hearing #1 is at 9 tomorrow morning in Rochester. The date got assigned way back on November 11th (as the album says, Yes, and Veterans Day;). That was during my period of Laptus Interruptus, where I was not able to enter hearing dates into my computer. I knew it was sometime around this week, but never put it on the Outlook calendar. This blessed non-attention continued when a case I had originally scheduled for a Buffalo hearing in November, then adjourned to December 5th, got postponed further when the whole federal government shut down that day for Bush's funeral observance. I had conflicts on the replacement calendar date of December 6th, as well as the next regular calendar date last Wednesday, so I got an agreement to reschedule it for tomorrow, when my calendar said I was free.
My calendar was wrong. The next step was to try to settle the hearing here (the conflicting one is mandatory, not subject to settlement and virtually impossible to adjourn). I made numerous efforts with the attorney for the other side- who, as in the past, hinted at possible settlement, even asking me to draft a formal proposal, only to kibosh it at the end of last week. I tried a different tack yesterday morning, with the same result coming in an email at 4 yesterday afternoon. Finally, I've faced the inevitability of not being able to clone myself, and have done one of the hardest things in the world for me to do:
I've delegated it.
----
One of my coworkers here doesn't take BK cases anymore, but is quite good at it, and I've gotten her to cover the hearing here for me tomorrow. It's one of the skills I've never really picked up, this delegation business. As I've come to realize only recently, I think it's a by-product of my own upbringing, where I was never given an opportunity to learn how to do stuff that doesn't come naturally to me; the impatience I experienced rubbed off onto me and projects out from me, and I have a very hard time showing or explaining to someone how to do the stuff that does come naturally. I seriously considered doing some logistically nightmarish things so I could get in and out of the 9:00 Rochester hearing quickly, speed like a maniac back here and have them hold the case until I got there. But I resisted, and I think rightly so.
----
Meanwhile, I spent parts of the past two afternoons slogging around a near-dark factory floor where a client's bankruptcy auction is scheduled for early next month; have begun watching the Netflix stream of the final performance of Springsteen on Broadway; and am getting ready for a pre-Christmas blast of giving for the kids' holiday, for a friend's birthday this weekend, and for the first wedding we've attended in ages.
Fortunately, none of these require me to be in more than one place at once. Yet.
ETA. It's all good, until at least 2019. My 9:00 Rochester hearing went easy peasy, and my awesome coworker managed the 10:00 Buffalo hearing just fine. We may settle it yet before the calendar turns over.
So it's not unusual for the occasional time conflict to come up. Even our one Bankruptcy Court has no controls over double-booking, but usually I'm able to sort things in time. That's what has resulted in my singing the theme song from this much-beloved album:
Two things to blame for this, other than my own brain cells: a broken computer and a dead president.
----
Conflicted Hearing #1 is at 9 tomorrow morning in Rochester. The date got assigned way back on November 11th (as the album says, Yes, and Veterans Day;). That was during my period of Laptus Interruptus, where I was not able to enter hearing dates into my computer. I knew it was sometime around this week, but never put it on the Outlook calendar. This blessed non-attention continued when a case I had originally scheduled for a Buffalo hearing in November, then adjourned to December 5th, got postponed further when the whole federal government shut down that day for Bush's funeral observance. I had conflicts on the replacement calendar date of December 6th, as well as the next regular calendar date last Wednesday, so I got an agreement to reschedule it for tomorrow, when my calendar said I was free.
My calendar was wrong. The next step was to try to settle the hearing here (the conflicting one is mandatory, not subject to settlement and virtually impossible to adjourn). I made numerous efforts with the attorney for the other side- who, as in the past, hinted at possible settlement, even asking me to draft a formal proposal, only to kibosh it at the end of last week. I tried a different tack yesterday morning, with the same result coming in an email at 4 yesterday afternoon. Finally, I've faced the inevitability of not being able to clone myself, and have done one of the hardest things in the world for me to do:
I've delegated it.
----
One of my coworkers here doesn't take BK cases anymore, but is quite good at it, and I've gotten her to cover the hearing here for me tomorrow. It's one of the skills I've never really picked up, this delegation business. As I've come to realize only recently, I think it's a by-product of my own upbringing, where I was never given an opportunity to learn how to do stuff that doesn't come naturally to me; the impatience I experienced rubbed off onto me and projects out from me, and I have a very hard time showing or explaining to someone how to do the stuff that does come naturally. I seriously considered doing some logistically nightmarish things so I could get in and out of the 9:00 Rochester hearing quickly, speed like a maniac back here and have them hold the case until I got there. But I resisted, and I think rightly so.
----
Meanwhile, I spent parts of the past two afternoons slogging around a near-dark factory floor where a client's bankruptcy auction is scheduled for early next month; have begun watching the Netflix stream of the final performance of Springsteen on Broadway; and am getting ready for a pre-Christmas blast of giving for the kids' holiday, for a friend's birthday this weekend, and for the first wedding we've attended in ages.
Fortunately, none of these require me to be in more than one place at once. Yet.
ETA. It's all good, until at least 2019. My 9:00 Rochester hearing went easy peasy, and my awesome coworker managed the 10:00 Buffalo hearing just fine. We may settle it yet before the calendar turns over.