After a pleasant lunch in the courtyard, Becky stopped by the main building to check her inbox. Tom and a couple other attorneys strolled in through the front, back from their lunch as well. Becky kept her head down and tried to stay out of the way.
“Hey, hey… you,” Tom, Becky realized, was addressing her. “Sit down with us for a second.”
She sat down with him in the center of the lobby, along with Daniel, one of the junior associates, who seemed to be attempting to smile reassuringly. She didn’t quite feel reassured.
“We need you to do a very important project for us,” Tom intoned. He looked very serious. She looked from Tom to Daniel, suddenly feeling nervous.
“Absolutely. Tell me what you need.” Legal pad posed on lap, she readied herself to take thorough notes.
“So you know that case, that, that—”
“Hunsaker,” clarified Daniel.
“That Hunsaker case,” Tom continued fluidly, “what we need is one of those, those—”
“Grids?” supplied Daniel.
“Right, a grid, like a, a—”
“Table.”
“A table, exactly, of the, the—you know, that thing you’ve been working on—”
“The chronology,” Daniel translated, “the Hunsaker chronology that you’ve been researching for us. We’d like you to organize it into a table.”
“Great,” her voice quavered slightly; she prayed they didn’t notice.
“So for columns, no for rows, we want dates, for columns, we want document, bates stamp number, description, source, who was involved, and oh, oh—well let’s start with that.” Tom nodded, satisfied, at Daniel. He scratched his ear. That seemed to be the end of all the instructions she was going to get. She looked down at her pad of paper. She had written down:
grid
table
columns rows, dates
columns doc, bates? stamp #s, ? ? ?
She looked up at both of them. Her mouth felt incredibly dry.
Daniel looked like he had something else to add. In the end, he settled with, “If you have questions, just come talk to me.”
“Okay,” she was reeling, “Would you prefer this done in Word, or Excel?”
“What?” Tom seemed outraged, his voice nearing hysterical. She shrank two inches in her chair. “What is she asking? ‘Excel’? I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a computer program--” started Daniel.
“Excel? I don’t know, I don’t care; we just need a grid, okay? Alright? Just a grid. Simple. Can you do that?”
“Excel will be fine,” Daniel interjected.
“However you want to do it, I don’t care,” Tom was throwing his hands up in the air now. “Just a grid. You can do that, right? That’s not too much to ask for?”
“Of course not,” she felt about the size of a six year old. Just behind Tom’s head, she noticed Laura, the receptionist, was smirking.
“That’s no problem,” with effort, Becky made eye contact with Tom. “If anything comes up, I’ll talk to Daniel.” Thank God for that.
“Okay,” said Tom, somewhat calming. “Great. That will be very, very useful for us. Now Daniel…”
And they headed slowly and loudly upstairs to Tom’s office, debating a finer point on a sexual assault and battery case.
Becky took a deep breath. Laura caught her eye, and laughed.
“That’s a very important project, there,” she grinned. “You better get right to work on that one.”
She looked at her paper. “All he wants is a simple Excel table, right? With like five different columns?”
Laura shrugged, “Sounds like it. But that’s a very important project,” she imitated Tom’s tone, “that is critically important to us. Are you sure you can handle that?”
Finally Becky smiled, but there was still a curl of tension in her stomach. “Ah, man,” she said, “I’m really glad I have that Stanford degree, to prepare me for such difficult projects, such as making a single table in Excel.”
“Excel?” mocked Laura, “what’s Excel?”
Becky smiled. “Laura,” she began, “what’s a ‘bates stamp’—?”
“No, really though,” said Laura, as the phone rang and she reached for it. “You should get going. He’ll buzz you before you know it. It’s one of those days. I can tell.”
Tom buzzed Becky in her office approximately every thirty minutes on the hour and half hour for the rest of the afternoon. She lost track of how many times she printed out the template for the Hunsaker table, ran over to show it to him, and came back with his corrections. Eight times? Ten times? It felt like the most horrendous waste of paper she had ever experienced. At one point, Tom objected to the height of a particular row, and she internally debated whether or not it was worth it to try to explain the Autofit feature of cell sizing. She decided against it, and just adjusted the row manually, even though it was unnecessary.
Nearing the end of the afternoon she felt shredded, a pile of nerves. And for what? she thought. For some rehashing of the information that they already have, that they may or may not actually use in trial. She stepped into Valentina’s office, to drop off the finalized template into Tom and Daniel’s boxes. Not that it was actually filled in yet. Tom just wanted confirmation (ie, more trees to die).
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