Back to the grind

I took almost an entire week off from work, successfully avoiding doing any work-related stuff other than answering a handful of urgent emails in the first day or so. That felt great! I desperately needed the break. And while I did a lot of cool activities, including writing, and spending some quality time with my SIL, and getting the suit fitting I posted about before, I also spent a good deal of time just resting. I deeply needed the rest and am proud to say I got three separate nights during that week when I got 6 or more hours of actual sleep. That’s a marked improvement over most weeks since the first part of August.

But now I’m back at work and have already, in just two days, worked more than 25 hours on the same ol’ litigation junk that I thought I had put to rest for at least a few weeks when I filed, just as I headed out the door for vacation, the motions we’d worked on for over a month. In reality, we got just over 24 hours to savor having made those motions before receiving the other side’s latest salvo. Now we’re back to preparing response briefs and doing so much of the work for outside counsel.

Honestly, I’m over this crud. Totally. If I never read another pleading – or prepare one – again, it’ll be too soon. And there’s really no end in sight. Add to that my boss’ constant interruptions (seriously, more than 2 dozen since he got back from lunch today alone) to grouse and rant and curse and complain – so that I have to stop trying to get through reading the pleadings, stop making my own notes, stop getting anything productive done to listen – and I’m right back to the stressed-out wreck I was before taking last week off. Including back to sleeping only about 4 hours or less each of the last two nights.

And because we have to get these responses filed next week, I have to cancel my business trip that I was supposed to do next week. It was going to be an opportunity to get together with some of my staff from other countries and participate in some critical executive planning sessions. But court deadlines trump. It’s just frustrating that my “day job”, the work I’m supposed to do as the leader of a functional business unit, has to take a backseat to what are truly specious claims by a bunch of money-grubbers trying to get a free payday.

Ah, well. I keep telling myself that at least I’m doing substantive lawyering, not rote grunt-work. That’s something, I guess.

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