Twenty years ago I was working a summer job at law school after first year putting together the next year's materials together and did a very bad job. I was photocopying cases day after day and not checking very closely so that the upcoming first year students got to read cases where the text of one judge's ruling actually concluded with the text from some other judge's ideas on another case from another jurisdiction at another time. Quality control was not my strong suit back then. Lesson: don't hire the guy with something like slight dyslexia and large laziness to put together your materials.

We had classes back then on professional matters and once a lawyer came in to tell us about the implications of the newly pervasive fax machines. Lesson: just because someone faxes you do not immediately fax back any faster than you would if you had received a letter by post. The faxes in the law school building were busy that spring. From the first day at what I then was calling "work" but now would call vacation I had noticed that wherever there was a fax machine there was a student busily sending hand-written notes. Often they were only a few big characters and always in Chinese. No global internet and no handy laptops meant the fax in another land was the newest best hub to pass news. The pace got more and more frantic as June began.