disaster

I was at work when I decided to check my email. It was 1:30pm, and the plan was to work until 6pm and then go home to prep for tomorrow’s oral argument.

I had about six hours of prep time scheduled for tomorrow, but I figured a few more hours tonight couldn’t hurt.¹

Thank god I decided to check my email, because I saw an email from my moot court instructor reminding me that my oral argument is TODAY AT 4PM!

Almost shat myself. My weeks are planned to the second, and this entire week’s schedule was built around the (mistaken) assumption that the argument was Friday at 4pm. I must have entered the oral argument date incorrectly three weeks ago and (mis)planned according! Everything was ripe with fail.

I shut down my computer, raced to my car, and started practicing my opening statements on the speed drive home.

I slapped on my suit and then bolted to school with an hour to spare before my argument. I didn’t bother bring my laptop to school because it doesn’t print to the school computers anymore. I would just print from the library computers. No problem right?

Wrong!

I went to the library’s fourth floor computer lab – full.
I went to the downstairs computer lab – full, of a class of LLMs or something…
I went back upstairs, and one of my awesome² 3L friends let me print from her computer.

I then went downstairs to one of the non-printing/public computers to do additional research, but the creepy unemployed man³ sitting next to me kept quizzing me on what I was looking up and extolling the virtues of LexisNexis (I was on Westlaw.)

The hobo started to lecture me on the evils of the criminal justice system so I skipped off to the-then abandoned school cafeteria to finish prepping. The cafe closes around 2pm, so there were only a few stray 1Ls, but no hobos…

20 minutes before the argument I had a weird feeling – I felt prepared!

I had EIGHT hours set aside to prep for this stupid oral argument and I felt PREPARED after a single hour! A single hour which was mostly spent running around like a headless chicken! I felt both empowered and hopelessly stupid at the same time, which is exactly how 2Ls are supposed to feel.

The argument went well, and the mistakes my instructor pointed out in his critique were not things that I would have avoided with more prep time. I’m fairly natural during oral arguments, but I have to be careful not to channel Nancy Grace.⁴

I left school around 5pm. I no longer had to spend all day Friday prepping for the oral argument, so I felt like I had an inordinate amount of time on my hands.

And now it’s almost 9pm, and I don’t know what just happened to the past four hours…hm.

¹ I bought a new suit jacket before work because my old one had a bullet hole in it.
² Awesome, life saving, super heroic…
³ Before you start cracking jokes this was NOT a law student but a random “might be homeless” dude.
⁴Which I sort of did when I pleaded with the court not to assist the Senators of Moot in perpetrating a betrayal of the taxpayer’s trust… my moot court instruct was all, “WOAAAAAAAH there skipper!” I wished at that moment that I had a power bob to toss…