Thursday 2^nd August

Very busy days at work.

I am doing a very time-consuming job which involves lots of checking and cross-checking – not my finest hour; I am not the Queen of Detail…Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend and she asked what my job involves.  I said, “Well you would know better than anyone the sort of things I do, because I know you worked as a legal secretary for a while.”  Aha!  Indeed she understood the concept!  She worked for a lawyer in the days before computers and word-processors so I imagine everything would have been even more time-consuming and fernickety.  She made me laugh a lot by telling me that in her first few weeks, when she was writing up documents about deceased people’s estates, she came across the word intestate.  She had never heard of such a word (English is her second language,) so she wrote on all of the documents that the people concerned had died interstate.  This must have caused just a tiny bit of consternation amongst the legal fraternity when they were trying to work out why they couldn’t find the last will and testament of the deceased…