You Know,
Back at Dartmouth, I always excused my slowness in replying to important emails by saying that I was just too busy to deal with them - and so they'd pile up, waiting, for days, a week, longer. And sometimes I really was very literally too busy; there were plenty of days when I had no time to eat or sleep, much less reply to non-urgent messages. Y'all know I was a little overbooked, overworked, and overcommitted.
But this summer?
I don't really have that excuse anymore. I'm quite busy at work (see below), but in the evenings, I just lose all motivation to do anything that's not, well, leisure. I guess I'm making up for lost time. So if I've been supposed to write you, or reply to you, anytime in the last 2 weeks - I will soon! I promise! But I'm a little slower than I should be these days.
As for work: in case you were wondering, this is what I do. Imagine nearly 6,000 paper documents totaling approximately 50,000 pages. They can all be found, in no order whatsoever, with no indexing (aside from the fact that each page is numbered), no organization, no nothing, just document after document, in several filing cabinets. They can also be found in a computerized database. There is no order to the database either. Sometimes they are labeled, sometimes they are not. No one person has actually read all of them, and there is no quality control - there are drafts, revisions, final copies, duplicates, bad photocopies, illegible handwritten notes, and missing pages.
You have three ways to navigate amongst the documents: 1. Via the one thread of sanity - the Bates number. Each page has a number, and if you know the number you want, you can access that page. 2. Scroll, page by page or document by document, through the entire mess, opening each one individually to ascertain its contents. 3. Use a Google search bar to search within the text of the documents - recognizing that these are photocopies of photocopies text-scanned with capricious OCR that only sometimes actually gets the text right - and more often than not doesn't, leaving you with unformatted typo-ridden gobbeldygook.
Imagine taking that and creating from it a coherent timeline of everything that's happened regarding the matter that these documents discuss. A coherent, succinct, and relevant timeline, focusing on the useful and important items and leaving the chaff.
Welcome to my summer.
(My timeline report, by the way, is almost done, and it clocks in at just 70 pages, though it will likely total more like 80 by the end of the next day or two.)