Working From Home

A couple of weeks ago, my firm assigned a brief to me and another associate in a National Labor Relations Board case the firm has been involved with for a few years. We're each writing one of the two issues in the brief. The catch, though, was that in addition to all of our regular work, preparation for writing this brief would include reading the 16,000 pages of transcript from the actual courtroom proceedings in the case, which were held in federal courts in New York and Washington, DC this spring.

That's not a typo. I said sixteen thousand pages.

I've managed to fit some in among all the other work, but when I'm in the office, phone calls and e-mails come in constantly, and other things require my attention (like my sixty active civil service cases). It's great to be busy and in demand at my job, but it isn't conducive to settling down with a couple of boxes full of paper and giving them my full attention for several hours.

So here I am working from home today. I've gotten through a decent chunk already, but with tons more to go - and naturally I still have occasional other things coming my way via e-mail (I haven't checked my work voice-mail yet, but I certainly will soon). I'm also getting hungry - and I immediately knew what I had to do.

SeamlessWeb was started several years ago by a couple of New York City lawyers who were frustrated by the complexity of getting their firm to reimburse them for meals they ate when they were working late at the office, but it expanded way beyond that in the following years. The vast majority of delivery restaurants in Manhattan, and many in other boroughs as well, are now on SeamlessWeb's network. You just go online, give them your credit card and address once, and forever after, it will tell you which restaurants deliver to your location and which of those are open right now, and you select from an online menu.

Even in my relatively sleepy residential neighborhood, it's still Manhattan - 101 restaurants on Seamlessweb.com deliver to this address. It's a beautifully efficient method of ordering a meal, and I've probably used it close to a hundred times since I discovered it in... oh, I don't know for sure, 2005? They're also in a few other cities, though I can't remember any offhand beyond Philadelphia.

Anyway, there's a rather large burrito winging its way to me shortly, courtesy of SeamlessWeb and Burritoville. It's going to help get me through the next few thousand pages of testimony. I hope y'all are having a nice day and a good lunch.