Report from Deposition Nation
I've just completed four years of editing legal depositions, and as each day passes I become more and more certain that Depo Nation has an oozing watch on its flag and Salvador Dali's birthday as its national holiday. It's worth a daily 50-mile round trip just to see what new manifestation of the surreal will display itself. Every one of the gems below crossed my desk during May or June of 2005.
Let's start with the attorneys, since depositions start with them. They're well-educated men and women, but once in a while they stray beyond the bounds of their expertise, Daubert be damned. Here's a lawyer who thinks he's an etymologist:
Q. And what is necrotic tissue?
A. It is tissue that no longer has circulation in it.
Q. Is it dead?
A. Yes.
Q. Hence the phrase "necro" --
A. Don't know.
Q. -- from the Latin. Okay. Before graduating from [Catholic high school], did you take Latin?
A. I did.
Q. Okay.
A. 15 years ago.
Fifteen years, fifteen minutes, fifteen centuries; the witness was never going to learn Greek roots in Latin class.
Then there are the amateur historians. The witness is a doctor who has just testified that he believes the plaintiff's carpal-tunnel syndrome to have been caused by overuse of vibratory tools, thereby provoking this lawyerly foray into the history of technology:
Q. So, [plaintiff]'s condition, he could not have possibly possessed had he lived before the Industrial Revolution, when they invented machines?
So it wasn't just the Great Pyramid that was put up by aliens, but the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Notre-Dame, St. Peter's, and Independence Hall, too. (And, for that matter, maybe there wasn't any carpal-tunnel syndrome before the Industrial Revolution. I've never seen any evidence that there was.)
Then there are the transcribers: a dedicated, overworked, sometimes insufficiently appreciated group. Like all other mortals, they err. Some of the errors are jewels, though, and I suspect that our more playful transcribers let a few slip just to tease me. Who could resist this tiny mistake, with its suggestion of an hitherto unsuspected cause of mad-cow disease? The witness is describing a feeding trough that for some reason had to be placed in the entrance to a silo, necessitating a risky climb for the farmhands:
Q. And if you didn't unwire it, how did you get into the silo?
A. Sometimes someone would climb up over it and -- when you get up on top of the chute there, the stationery chute. . .
Not just contented cows. . .educated cows. Might one have received a Dear John letter?
Then, you might want to avoid a certain hospital in North Carolina whose employees, according to the testimony of a doctor who once worked there (with just the slightest tweak by a transcriber), seem to be extraordinarily mutinous:
A. The best recollection I have is that you'd meet periodically to see what -- what infections were occurring within the -- within the hospital -- if you had an outbreak of staff or something and what was being done to solve it.
Higher pay and shorter hours might help. Really, though, management should never have let disaffection come to this pass. They should have done something substantial when there was only a staff infection, which is something like blue flu.
If you must go to North Carolina, it's probably best to plan your itinerary so as to avoid Danville, Kentucky, which apparently has swollen into a megalopolis while we all slept. The witness is an employee of a Danville nursing home:
Q. How many nursing homes does Danville have?
A. Two; us and [the other home].
Q. How far is it from [the witness' place of employment] to [the other home]?
A. In between -- about an hour and a half.
You can cross Chicago in an hour and an half. I've done it. The witness actually said "about a mile and a half," but the transcriber, new to this area, couldn't penetrate the Eastern Kentucky accent.
And what about the editors? What can I, an editor, say that wasn't said better two millennia ago? Read Matthew 7:3-5.
Let's start with the attorneys, since depositions start with them. They're well-educated men and women, but once in a while they stray beyond the bounds of their expertise, Daubert be damned. Here's a lawyer who thinks he's an etymologist:
Q. And what is necrotic tissue?
A. It is tissue that no longer has circulation in it.
Q. Is it dead?
A. Yes.
Q. Hence the phrase "necro" --
A. Don't know.
Q. -- from the Latin. Okay. Before graduating from [Catholic high school], did you take Latin?
A. I did.
Q. Okay.
A. 15 years ago.
Fifteen years, fifteen minutes, fifteen centuries; the witness was never going to learn Greek roots in Latin class.
Then there are the amateur historians. The witness is a doctor who has just testified that he believes the plaintiff's carpal-tunnel syndrome to have been caused by overuse of vibratory tools, thereby provoking this lawyerly foray into the history of technology:
Q. So, [plaintiff]'s condition, he could not have possibly possessed had he lived before the Industrial Revolution, when they invented machines?
So it wasn't just the Great Pyramid that was put up by aliens, but the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Notre-Dame, St. Peter's, and Independence Hall, too. (And, for that matter, maybe there wasn't any carpal-tunnel syndrome before the Industrial Revolution. I've never seen any evidence that there was.)
Then there are the transcribers: a dedicated, overworked, sometimes insufficiently appreciated group. Like all other mortals, they err. Some of the errors are jewels, though, and I suspect that our more playful transcribers let a few slip just to tease me. Who could resist this tiny mistake, with its suggestion of an hitherto unsuspected cause of mad-cow disease? The witness is describing a feeding trough that for some reason had to be placed in the entrance to a silo, necessitating a risky climb for the farmhands:
Q. And if you didn't unwire it, how did you get into the silo?
A. Sometimes someone would climb up over it and -- when you get up on top of the chute there, the stationery chute. . .
Not just contented cows. . .educated cows. Might one have received a Dear John letter?
Then, you might want to avoid a certain hospital in North Carolina whose employees, according to the testimony of a doctor who once worked there (with just the slightest tweak by a transcriber), seem to be extraordinarily mutinous:
A. The best recollection I have is that you'd meet periodically to see what -- what infections were occurring within the -- within the hospital -- if you had an outbreak of staff or something and what was being done to solve it.
Higher pay and shorter hours might help. Really, though, management should never have let disaffection come to this pass. They should have done something substantial when there was only a staff infection, which is something like blue flu.
If you must go to North Carolina, it's probably best to plan your itinerary so as to avoid Danville, Kentucky, which apparently has swollen into a megalopolis while we all slept. The witness is an employee of a Danville nursing home:
Q. How many nursing homes does Danville have?
A. Two; us and [the other home].
Q. How far is it from [the witness' place of employment] to [the other home]?
A. In between -- about an hour and a half.
You can cross Chicago in an hour and an half. I've done it. The witness actually said "about a mile and a half," but the transcriber, new to this area, couldn't penetrate the Eastern Kentucky accent.
And what about the editors? What can I, an editor, say that wasn't said better two millennia ago? Read Matthew 7:3-5.
posted by Bill Kenney at 4:07 PM
1 Comments:
3
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
4
How can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove that splinter from your eye,' while the wooden beam is in your eye?
5
You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother's eye.
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