Associate Advice, pls hndle thx

Pls Hndle Thx: Ticking Time Bomb

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

ATL,

I have a pet peeve.  When scheduling conference calls, certain people, particularly associates at firms representing codefendants, frequently identify the time zone as “EST” or “PST” when we’re on daylight savings time.  Of course the writer means “EDT” or “PDT,” and everyone acts as if they wrote that.  But it bugs me.  And I have reason to think that some people see it as a sign of sloppy work.  Is it appropriate to point out this mistake (privately, of course)?

— Timed Out

Dear Timed Out,

You are absolutely right: typos such as confusing EST with EDT are indicative of sloppy work and its first cousin, sloppy thought. Frankly, they’re inexcusable when clients pay lawyers like yourself thousands of dollars to fight their battles – not “they’re batles.”

It is certainly appropriate and even advisable to take your colleague aside and politely (but firmly) explain that making typos in mass communiques is humiliating for everyone and that you don’t appreciate the stench of amateur hour rubbing off on you.

Wait a minute. Uh-oh. I just re-read the email you sent to ATL which contained your above question. You wrote:

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[…I’ll know you’re desparate for entries if you actually run this.]

Oh boy. Well, this is embarrassing.

I’ll conclude with the final passage from a short story, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson:

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared spaced by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Commenters, descend!

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Your friend,
Marin

Get a life. Seriously. Call 1-800-GET-LIFE and purchase a raison d’être for five easy payments of $19.95. This has to be the pettiest pet peeve possible. I don’t like it when my wife sleeps with her BlackBerry under her pillow; that’s a pet peeve. What you’re talking about is a kind of frightening disorder.

I have a questions for you: just how close to the edge are you? Are you at a Ray Finkle/”laces out, Dan” point? Do you do that weird thing where you step over the cracks in the sidewalk? Since you so clearly see the flaws in other people, do you look in the mirror and see a hideous gargoyle looking back at you? Or are you one of those obsessive hypocrites — everybody else has flaws, but your excrement smells like roses? Do you ever wonder if the Unabomber got started by having ridiculous pet peeves, or have you already written a “manifesto” of sorts about time zones and are just trying to find a newspaper that will run it?

Anyway, I have some concrete advice for you: every time you become annoyed by the PST/PDT mistake, find the closest solid object and ram your head into it. At some point, after you have suffered enough cranial bruising, you’ll realize that there are far more important things to be annoyed with than the way a person abbreviates a temporal distinction.

Stay off the ledge, Timed Out.
— Well Adjusted Adult

Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

Earlier: Prior installments of pls hndle thx

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