After dealing full time round the clock with legal issues, I now return to the world to discover that part of China has blown up, that part of Japan is about to blow up, and that the largest wildfires in recorded history are racing across the American west. Almost come to the belief that it would be better to return to cranking out legal motions.

The legal work has demonstrated a host of residual problems.

I go to the copy shop. I lift the lid on the machine to place a document that is too stiff to pass through the document feeder. I then proceed to copy a second document which is run through the document feeder. This second print run includes duplicated print outs of the materials printed direct from the platen. No problem. Must be my idiocy. I press the button to clear all memory and proceed with copying.

Then I need to make additional copies of materials too stiff to pass through the document feeder. The memory clear button is activated. Normal documents are then run through the document feeder. Despite machine memory having been cleared the machine prints both the document run through the feeder together with copies of those documents printed direct from the platen.

I loose it.

I yell over at the staffer in the print copy area. I am upset. I realize during the course of my outburst that what I am doing is not socially acceptable. It may be justified but it is not acceptable. I am embarrassed and upset with myself.

The staffer comes over. I explain the problem. She advises she has had the same problem. No one in the building knows the correct key to push to clear machine memory. We arrange to collect the unwanted copies. She will reimburse my credit card a total of $2.50.

During the writing process I experienced many other problems. I may have a reference document available to me in physical form. One minute it is there, in use. The next minute it has vanished into thin air. One minute it exists in my hand. The next second it has disappeared into some alternate universe where it will never be seen again.

Since I am prone to errors a great deal of time is devoted to error checking. Not once. Not twice. But five or six times. And the final document still contains errors.

Another problem. I work on a document and make changes to it. Next morning, I review my work. Something is missing. The changes I seem to remember making are not found in the document. I am perplexed. I look for my notes, for written drafts, trying to recover what it was that I entered yesterday. Then I discover that I am actually working on two documents. Each of the critical documents I am working on has a doppelganger. They are different but they share similar names. I have made changes to one but not to the other.

I am very careful before I go to make copies. I have lists that I create. I check items off the list. I make sure everything is prepared and complete. I make small stacks with each one containing a specific document to be copied, all the pages held by a bulldog clip. Everything is on the list. I have checked multiple times. I arrive at the copy shop. I discover missing documents, incomplete documents, wrong documents. I do not shout or scream. I am used to bamboozling myself in these various ways. I am bamboozler in chief. But at least I am not blowing anything up.