I hate affidavits.

I sort of straddle two worlds in my job. 75% of the time, I'm a litigation associate, so I'm litigating. By litigating, I mean writing threatening letters, motions chiseling away at jurisdiction to get complaints dismissed or researching commercial fixtures. Or I'm writing Complaints deraigning title, and attempting to quiet it. Whatever.

The other 23% of my practice is corporate. Ugh. Corporate. Today I drafted roughly 40 corporate documents. See, we have this bank as one of our clients, and we do a lot of the contractual work for the bank, writing security agreements and filing UCC-1 Statements with UCCINC (why the fuck did Florida privatize that?!) and writing unanimous shareholder agreements and indemnity agreements and certifications of documents blah blah blah, so that the bank will give millions of dollars to people to knock down buildings and put up condos.

I actually really like writing these things, because they're boilerplate. I open up one that I've done in the past, and thanks to the magic of "Track Changes" I simply delete the green that I put in last time, and insert the green words that I need to use this time. It's brilliant and I get to bill, bill, bill them hours! Also, it's not frustrating, because there's always a correct answer to shove into the blank. Lord. Boilerplate is awesome.

Boilerplate is awesome to a certain extent. Except...when I have to go through all the agreements I've drafted before I turn them in to the Higher Power, to check them for accuracy.

Now, another point of note: My HP 11oo Laserjet Printer is on its last legs, poor thing. It's smoke stained from the fact that my office was the smoking lounge, and I'm pretty sure that i dealt it one of its final blows a few weeks ago when I "GOT AND PRINTED" and Shepardized like 35 cases in a row. The poor thing squeaks now and it sounds like it has gravel in the hotrollers. Oh, and did I mention it's slow as hell, and, when it has to print something with Track Changes, the printer actually sulks like a petulant child? I hit print, and then hear the damn thing groaning for 20 seconds, before it begrudgingly takes a page and churns. out. one. page. at. a. time. With a 10 second delay between each page. An d when you've got a 12 page document, that's one of 25 that you're doing... it can be time consuming to. do. anything. Not to mention stapling, coalating, organizing them, and then using my "DRAFT" stamp. DRAFT! DRAFT! DRAFT! (It's blue and red. I love it. Almost as much as I love my Notarial stamp...)

So... it's really annoying when I sit down and hammer out 40 documents in about six hours (pretty good!) to then go through said documents, and notice that on every. fucking. page. I have made some careless error because "Track Changes" puts lines and dashes all over the page, obscuring little nitpicky errors that I would have CAUGHT if not for Trackchanges.

Okay. Maybe not. Usually I'm on such tremendous autopilot when drafting these things, I crank 'em out like a mimeograph machine...only to realize that without fail I commit some stupid mistake in just about every document. Instead of going through the agony of Hearing ole Eleven grind and hum it's melancholy "Da-wooooonnn-na-na-na-na-na-keeup, ha-ka, wooooooooonnn-na-na-na-na-keup, ha-ka, wooooooooonnn..." I usually just print off the one page with the error on it for every document I've drafted.

Know what I did today? The error du jour was I left off "Dollars" from Two Million One Hundred Fifty Thousand and 00/100 ($2,150,000.00).

It was that, and also I left off:

STATE OF FLORIDA))

COUNTY OF MIAMI-DADE))

on the affidavits I was writing, above the notarial signature.

Do you know how ANNOYING it is to pick through FORTY DOCUMENTS (probably more, I estimated) and find the SAME error on EVERY. SINGLE. DOCUMENT?! Especially when it's already 7 at night, and you just want to go HOME!?

It's really annoying. And that, my friends, is why I hate affidavits... but more than that, I think I hate myself for rushing. I need to have someone embroider "A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE" on a sampler, and hang it above my freakin' monitor.