Hands occupied...

Mobile in one hand, a fag in the other, no idea who was on the other end and why he was waiting there. But he seemed happy enough.

I'd popped out at lunchtime, I always try to just to keep the head clear and escape the desk for even just fifteen minutes. It's always made a little more necessary when I end up eating my prepared lunch an hour before lunchtime. And today I just needed to get away from utter pointlessness. Not the job, not the work I'm doing, nothing like that. More the people I'm dealing with (and not work colleagues).

One of the things you often come across as a lawyer when bouncing documents back and forth between parties is that certain type of person who just cannot leave alone. Who can't accept that something is fine. Who is desperate to change something as if it's their only way to preserve their worth (I once, as a trainee, had to redraft a 200 page project agreement because the footers were only 3 point spaced from the bottom of the text instead of five point). And so today a redraft of one of our standard agreements came back. The offending line in it was:

"This Agreement is to be construed subject to the definitions listed in Schedule 1"

The version I got back had this marked up as not acceptable. In its place was:

"Defined terms in this Agreement shall have the meanings thereto ascribed in Schedule 1"

I read it. And re-read it. And wondered if I'd missed something. I think what had possibly passed me by was that I wasn't being floridly legal enough. Why say 'Subject to...' when you can say 'Ascribed thereto...'? It's like the politicians' trick of answering a question with as many meaningless words as possible in the hope that the interviewer will have forgotten the question by the time he's finished, or there is no further time for more questions.

In other words a pointless waste of time for everyone concerned. And this goes on all the time, a sort of one-upmanship that I really can't be bothered joining in to play. In a more cantankerous mood I would respond asking exactly why the change had been made, but instead I'll just accept it and turn my attention to a couple of suggested changes that do actually ride roughshod over logic, common sense and business acumen.

Maybe they thought I'd argue about how we determine defined terms and forget about the rest? Maybe I'll complain about them screwing up the formatting in the document?