I had a deposition today, one I was defending. Big case, big witness. I had taken a lot of documents I'd need for it home with me last night, partly to do some last review in anticipation of the depo, mostly so I'd have everything I needed to take with me, so that I could go directly from home to the depo this morning w/o going by the office.
So when I was getting ready to leave my house for the depo this morning, I had a lot of stuff to pack up to take with me. And I remembered a soft messenger bag that I knew I had somewhere that I thought would hold more than what I had been using. Dug around a little in the upstairs of my old house, through all the junk that's accumulated in my study, and found what I was looking for. Took the bag downstairs and threw in all my stuff, grabbed a to go cup for my coffee, headed out the door, straight to the depo.
When I got to the law firm, I pretty much dumped out all my stuff onto the conference table and then just sorted it quickly into big stacks. Big stacks of documents. And the deposition began.
Maybe ten mintues into the deposition, my associate attorney, who was sitting next to me, pinched my arm gently, unnoticeable to anyone else. I looked over at her, and she inclined her head towards one of my stacks of documents. I looked, and holy shit, there was a ginormous spider crawling up the side of the stack of papers.
Bless her heart, my associate stood up and discretely picked up a napkin at the coffee/drink bar behind us, scooped up the spider with it, and tossed it in the trash. I was still trying to hide my squirminess and squealiness and girly need to shriek about the eek!gross!eww!yikes!omg!spider!spider!getitaway!eek! feeling about the whole thing. I was seriously thinking to myself, "stop the deposition! tell them we have a situation, this is an emergency, spider! spider! big one! stop the deposition!" But before my mouth formed the words my brain was screaming, my associate had dealt with it, the spider was gone, and as I looked around the table, I realized that no one else had even noticed, or at least had not thought to pay one bit of attention, to what was going on over on my end of the table.
I'm assuming, I mean it's pretty obvious, that what happened is that some big-ass creepy spider had hidden itself away into my messenger bag that I'd left lying around, opened and empty, in a room of my old house for who knows how long. And it must've attached itself to the documents I threw into the bag this morning, and it came right out with them when I put all my stuff on the table. So, sure, understandable. Not normal, not something that happens any old day, not welcome certainly, but explainable. And discreetly dealt with by my associate. My very capable female associate.
We both maintained our professionalism, completely and totally. On the outside anyway, which, hey, is all that really matters, right? I mean, no one even noticed, like I said. But eww! eww! eww! omg! I really really really wanted to jump up and squeal and demand that one of the men in the room kill it. Which, actually, makes me thinkg that maybe my associate is a more evolved female than I am. I apparently am still a bit of a whimpy woman when it comes to things like creepy crawly spiders, no matter the tough aura I attempt to give off when wearing my power suit and defending my key witness in a day-long deposition at a big firm in a big big case. Power woman, reduced by spider.
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