These past two days have shown me that you can never predict what can happen, especially when it comes to the criminal justice system.  Think you’ve got your day planned?  Think again.  Have something scheduled for a certain time?  Better make that a tentative appointment.

Yesterday, I planned to leave work around 5 PM so I could get home and get some homework done.  However, I ended up getting caught up in a very interesting conversation among the attorneys, and didn’t finish all my work until around 6.  The day before I expected to work pretty hard, but ended up spending the entire afternoon redesigning my supervisor’s house with her, and then chatting about food with her and another fantastic attorney.  We got absolutely no work done after lunch!

However, the coup de grace of all this was definitely today.  Since I had class this afternoon, I had originally planned not to go in to work at all.  I was so excited about sleeping in, strolling into a meeting at noon, and then camping out at TPC until class at 3.  However, as I was leaving yesterday one of the attorneys grabbed me and asked me to come help her this morning.  She was going to be running around in court a lot so extra hands would be helpful.  I agreed to help her, and it’s a good thing I did!  She texted me before I even got to the office asking me to bring over an order for blood work, some case law, and some drugscan documents that she’d forgotten.

My (modified) plan was to go to court in the morning, attend a meeting at noon, and then go to class at 3.  However, as soon as I met up with this attorney in person, she asked me to come interview a witness with her.  She said she was having difficulty locating another person to accompany her (DAs never prep witnesses alone) and that it would be a really good thing for me to experience.  However, she wasn’t planning to get back from her interview until 3:30.  This is one of those instances where a time turner would have been useful.  Alas, I’m not Hermione Granger and don’t have access to one. 

So many places to be at once-what’s a girl to do??

I ended up attending my meeting at noon, then heading over to TPC to talk to my professor.  I explained my situation to her, and she agreed to let me miss the first portion of class since they’d be discussing placement information that wouldn’t be applicable to me.

Having gotten the green light from my professor, I headed back to work and told my attorney that I was free to accompany her to her witness prep.  We left around 2 PM, and got slightly lost along the way.  Of course, it didn’t help that the children’s hospital our witness works at was 40 minutes away to begin with!  Once we finally arrived and figured out parking, we went inside and started tracking down our witness. Before we’d even been inside 5 minutes, an announcement came that all visitors were to exit the building.  Confused and frustrated, we followed instructions but were unhappy about it.  It turns out that a patient’s father was unhappy about having to wait, and went ballistic on the hospital staff.  He showed up with an entire entourage, and started raving about how he was going in anyway and how he had a gun.  Therefore, security and cops were called.  Everyone and their belongings were searched before anyone was let back into the hospital.  This was all completely unrelated to our homicide case, too!

By the time we got back into the hospital and found our witness, it was after 4.  Therefore, we didn’t finish up the prep until around 5:30.  Then we had to fight with the parking garage again.  The garage doesn’t charge you to park, but it charges you to leave!  You can’t just pay cash either.  You have to go get a token.  I was sent to get the token since I wasn’t driving, so I had to pay the machine $5.  Grr!  Of course, we got lost.  We didn’t end up getting back to the office until around 6:30!  Needless to say, I had missed most of class.  I was able to catch the final part, but my day did NOT turn out the way I’d planned whatsoever.

I think today was my craziest day yet in Philly, but you know what?  I don’t think I’d trade it for anything.  I was originally stressed out because things were deviating so far from the plan I’d made up in my head, but it all worked out in the end.  I got to experience the hectic adventure that is an ADA’s life, and I was able to spend some quality time bonding with one of my favorite ADAs.  She even said jokingly on the way back, “This is experiential learning at its best!”  It’s definitely safe to say that I’m starstruck with this attorney at this point!  Quite honestly, getting lost with her and laughing about the entire matter has been one of my favorite moments this semester.  The best moments happen so spontaneously and unpredictably.  It was more than worth the $5 the parking garage stole!

Welcome to Philadelphia and the criminal justice system, folks!