I did this entry elsewhere and then copied it into my formatted area here and got all sorts of little glitches, so I'm redoing it in the hopes of avoiding those, though, as I explain, the computer and I have a very troubled romance. I love it for its electronic global reach forward and backward in time across the politicial and geographical borders, able to give me all sorts of data and pictures instantly--when it's working. Using it for transcripts, however, is game-playing of a very high--or low-- order.
The ten volumes of re-created courtroom proceedings in 2507 pages by the Kinko count, which included some partial pages, title pages, and the lengthy index, occupied most of my three months from January through March. Much of the ordeal was role-playing Don Quixote , my new computer's windmill whacking away at me. Not referring to the 1984 and 1990 movies, during World War II in comic strips we had gremlins, "the little men who aren't there," doing mischievous sabotage; and I sometimes wonder if they haven't been hiding these decades until computers invaded our lives. At other times I think I'm dealing with a mechanical brat squalling, "No! No! I don't want to!" throwing itself down in a childish fit.
One of the first signs my new computer was ready for a brand-new assault on my sensibilities was the punctuation matter of a colon followed by a closing parenthesis. This happens steadily in our transcripts when we start a new section with time, date, parties, ending with "the following occurred:)" Movable Type is keeping a tight rein over my HP here, but what happens otherwise is an automatic Smiley Face lacking only its bright sunny yellow. The same sort of problem occurred when I did dates like the 21st or 22nd, for my HP automatically miniaturized and lofted the "st" and "nd," along with the Smiley Face way too casual for our sternly censorious state supreme court. So I had the nuisance solution of spacing between the colon and the paren or the numbers and the letters, then backspacing and deleting the spaces.
At the tops of our pages are witness lines and page numbers, the former identifying different witnesses in the Q&A sections and what the examination is. The first examination of a witness is Direct; the opposing attorney then questions in Cross; further examination is then Redirect and Recross until the attorneys are tired of badgering. There can be two examinations on a page of rapid-fire clean-up questions or even two witnesses when one ends and a new one begins. That means that the header, which is where the witness line goes in computerization, must change. However, my Hal was inflexible: whatever name and examination I typed in, he insisted would go on all the pages. And change also fouled up the page numbers. I spent most of a day trying to override this dictatorial rigidity, but the computer would actually shut down after a certain regular number of tries, seven, as I recall. That's true obstinacy.
Actually, the problem was much more complicated, for my computer didn't like the format I was copying from my old IBM typing days and the state manual instructions. To the left side of a court reporter's transcript page runs a vertical column of double-spaced numbers, a sacred 25 to every page. This is for ease of citation, of course: "line 18, page 23." With my margins set for the body of the text, my computer sullenly warned that the header-witness line and the line number column were outside the printable areas and then proceeded to mangle everything, like squeezing someone obese like me into a bikini. I can be stubborn too, but the compromise between us involved a three-part process for every page. I had to print off batches of pages with the line-number columns separately from that template, then run them through again to print off the text body, and finally type on the witness line and page numbers on my old IBM. Are you still wondering why it took me a few months for 2500 pages?
I don't think I can explain two further complications with that column of line numbers, but I'll try. My sister's software manages all this handily enough for her specialized computer, and she doesn't single-space any blurbs. Blurbs are little parenthetical explanations and belong, according to the manual I was accustomed to, single-spaced to the far right of the page. MovableType won't let me illustrate it here, but one of those would be like "(Thus made part of this Bill of Exceptions, Exhibit #345 is found in Volume VI of Exhibits.)" or "(Off-the-record discussion between The Court and counsel.)" Naturally, when I was still trying to put the double-spaced line numbers on my text pages, the computer gave each single-spaced line of the blurb a number, so the sacred 25 might turn into 31 or 19 or whatever. At one later point, the printer inexplicably got drunk and began having double vision for the pages with the line numbers, doubling them ever so slightly and then worse and worse, so that looking at them was like that movie effect when drunks see two objects instead of one. This double vision was vertical and grew so bad as to fill in all the space lines. I had to stop--not even creating a new template helped at first--and just work on text for a while.
And I had various scares and disasters with the electronic Black Hole where pages disappear into Space Time forever lost. One Sunday evening I was too fatiqued and apparently didn't hit the holy Save, for Monday morning turned bleakly black with nothing there. I learned that, if I rested my little fingers on the Shift keys too long, a strange black highlighting spread like mercury and refused my efforts to banish it, suddenly going poof with all my work. Glaring and grinning meanly, the computer would zap away. 28 pages here, 57 there. Whee!
Most strangely the Spell Check grew tired and cranky after an unknown number of pages usually between 65 and 100 and simply quit working, with bizarre exceptions. I could make blatant mistakes, but it was off resting. Since this is one of the computer's most brilliant talents, I frazzled constantly from discovering, after printing, that I had missed something in on-screen proofreading--at which I'm pretty good after 15,000 students' worth of themes way back when--and had to make the correction and then repeat the tripartite printing-typing process. It didn't help that my aggravated arthritis conflicted with my manual speed, and I developed tics like typing "no" for "on," the latter a popular courtroom word. As we all know, as long as the word is standard, Spell Check won't red squiggle it, even if it's clearly wrong in context, as in the case of homophones, i.e., typing "hear" for "here" or "fore a wile."
As usual, I found a way around the hurdle instead of stumbling along. When I noticed that Spell Check had gone off for a nap, I usually quit; and so the transcript was done in various batches of less than 100 pages. Subtract the 643 pages my sister thoughtfully did for me in her TLC and guess how many batches I had to later put together, which explains why ultimately I ended up with some missing pages and doubled page numbers and not just when incorporating her portions. Three hard-labor months wrestling this quirky HP wizard to make sure our worst serial rapist would not get his mistrial motion because the original court transcripts had been lost by some irresponsible lout. I need a WWF belt with a big buckle.
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