Here in Houston, we've got a "just add water" recipe for rush hour disaster. To understand why rain presents such a problem for Harris County commuters, you have to understand the average driver on our roadways:

An IQ roughly equivalent to that of a Rhesus monkey...
Piloting a Ford F-350 with a muddy four-wheeler in the bed...
A cold Coors in one hand, cell phone in the other...

So this morning when I wake up to a steady downpour and a TranStar website lit up like the Vegas Strip, a flat tire was absoultely the last thing I needed. So I pulled out my Indy pit crew A-game and got going in record time, somehow managing to get clear across town early.

I'm set up, already collecting business cards, when a second reporter shows up. Ordinarily I'd hold my ground, but since this was a Dust Docket case (Asbestos, for the uninitiated), two universal rules always apply:

1. The reporter appearing pursuant to the earlier notice wins, and...
2. The attorneys don't care which reporter takes the depo. Their only interest is to escape the mind-numbing world of asbestos products as expeditiously as possible. I've literally had my best client look at me and say, "Hell, she's set up. You've taken enough of these. Go home. Take a break."

Since her notice was dated a week before mine, I lost. So I packed up, somehow snapped my overpriced Treo 300 Sprint piece of crap phone in half, loaded up the F-350 (kidding!) and headed back across a rainsoaked Houston. Counting the tire change, it was four hours of complete futility, not a single solitary one of them billable.

Now for kicking a man when he's down. It seems that while I was frittering away my morning in traffic, some bastard spammer sent hundreds of thousands of herbal wang ointment e-mails to everyone in the free world with my spoofed personal e-mail address as the reply. Rather than just dealing with the roughly 200 spams my filter catches a day, now I'm getting literally hundreds more from angry masses rudely demanding to be removed from my "f#*$ing list." Best part, not a damn thing I can do about it. Until Mr. "1ncrease your d1ck size" runs out of people to spam, I guess I'm gonna keep getting hate mail.

"I find nothing more depressing than optimism." -- Paul Fussell