I can stop anytime I want to: In my profession (and I'm sure many others), the passage of time has been accelerating at an exponential rate over the past 15 years. Technology has enabled constant contact, which in turn has adjusted our expectations and increased our frustrations when someone dares to not answer their cell phone.

Litigators are all about deadlines - ones imposed by third parties, usually courts. As such, given a caseload of anywhere between 15 and 50 cases (depending on complexity and size), your day is a constant juggle - deciding which balls to throw high so you can work on catching some growling chainsaws that are coming down pretty fast. In ye olden dayes (like the seventies - and so I am told), a lawyer could take his damn well time in calling back clients, getting papers filed (judges and counsel always ready to provide an extension), and drafting their opinions.

But today, one cannot seem to get things done fast enough. Curiously, the more technology has made things easier, the more the pressure to get things done faster has increased. In the afore-mentioned ye olden dayes, if you were out of your office, you were out. You'd have to wait until someone got back in. "Now" meant "soon", "later". Then came some cool tech. Pagers were hot in the eighties, but you could always plead that you couldn't find a pay phone in Palau, where you were on vacation. Cell phones came next, and while your options shrank, you still had the fall-back of being out of a coverage area, or that you "had a bad cell".

Today, you're not only reachable by voice, but even your emails track you down at all hours and locations. You see those losers with their little Blackberrys - furiously maneuvering their fingertips to type out little misperled abbrev msgs ignoring punctuaation grammar and etiquette whats importnt is to get bck right away looking pretty doesnt matter!!!11

Well, as of this week, I blog before you as one of those losers. Brashly interrupting a conversation to "just check this email," my head down, ignoring you as I adroitly respond to every single inquiry, because god knows, they can't wait.

I'd love to blog some more, but my hip is vibrating.