God From a Machine

What a day. What. A. Day. I was frazzled all day long. I had to serve supplemental testimony today, and the client didn't give me the information I needed until 3-fucking-30.

Ugh.

I synthesized and composed everything in just 30 minutes and handed over the goods to my assistant to prepare for service. I will not go into details, but the process angered me.

All the while, I could only think of all the other things that were due later this week. Most importantly, my first evidentiary hearing was coming up on Thursday. It's my industry's quasi-equivalent of a trial, and it was all mine. I still had three witnesses to prep. Argh.

Then I looked at my calendar more carefully and had my second oh-shit moment in the past few weeks.

It turns out I was double-booked for Thursday. I had a very very very important meeting with all the bigwigs during my hearing.

WTF?!

I don't even know how that happened. Well, that's not exactly true. I do have some thoughts, but these, too, anger me, and I will again avoid going into details. Regardless, I had to take responsibility for the mix-up and figure out some way to fix this somehow, short of cloning myself.

I went to visit Bax. She's been sick as a dog for, like, ever. I was happy to see that she was much better today. Yay! I told her my woes, and she assured me I'd devise some sort of solution. I always do. I'm crafty like that.

We decided it was worth a shot to ask the administrative law judge for a continuance, even at this late date, so I planned to do that tomorrow morning during our scheduled conference call.

After being comforted by my friend that things would likely be ok somehow, I headed back to my office, where I spied the following e-mail from the ALJ in my inbox:

Ms. Monkey and Mr. Complainant: I have just been notified by our downtown LA office that large public demonstrations are expected on May 1 in downtown. Please see the link below. I suggest that we discuss the possibility of rescheduling the hearing during our call tomorrow. Thank you.

No fucking way!

I forwarded the beautiful e-mail to Bax, and we had this interchange:

Bax: Wow -- talk about a deus ex machina moment. You are clearly one of God's favorites. Seriously, that's almost weird, especially given you just talked about wanting that exactly five minutes ago in my office. Hey, you just proved the Secret! One of my friends truly believes that certain people have a stronger power to make things happen that they want for some reason. Congrats!!!

Monkey: It's creepily awesome! ;)

I am a lucky Monkey. And I love my friend because she says things like "deus ex machina moment."