Just covered a couple jobs in Houston for a New York reporting firm. I usually grit my teeth and mutter obscenities when a firm wants jobs done in their format, but not when it's a colleague from the Big Apple. The hours of margin tweaking, tab massaging and header fondling -- hmmm, feeling a little frisky now -- is more than compensated for by the fact that, when all is said and done, there's hardly any room on the page for the testimony.

For the uninitiated, from what I can tell, it is standard practice in New York to eat up Line 1 on every page with the witness' name; to allow about five inches max for the text box; and, best of all, to wedge colloquy between tertiary margins so narrow that if someone uttered "hydroxyacetylaminofluorene," your CAT system would lock up in an infinite loop trying to find a spot to squeeze it in. Haven't you always wanted to find a way to charge extra for counsel bickering back and forth? Cram their colloquy into an 18-character line and you've basically tripled the page rate for as long as they want to engage in urination contests on the record.

I've always understood that court reporting is a union gig in NY, though I have no actual info to back that up. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Regardless, it's inspiring that this "reporter friendly" page format, used and accepted by the majority, not just a renegade few, has survived the test of time and hasn't been outlawed by a committee of tyrranical busybodies looking to impose their will on the rest of the world.

By the way, if you haven't ordered your "I complied with the Texas Uniform Format Manual and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirt, check out depo•schwag, my online store.

"Sarcasm, the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded." -- Feodor Dostoevsky