Spent the week cheating on K with F, a very cute partner in another practice group who suckered me into joining a project with the initial representation that it would take no more than fifteen minutes of my time. “This is a very small thing,” he said. “Fix this draft, then boom-boom-boom, you’re done.” That initial “very small thing” took me three hours, of course, after which I reported back to F. “Very good,” he said. “Now, fix these other two things.” Before I knew it there were eight “small things” that had somehow landed on my desk, all requiring my urgent attention. Progression from drafting to signing to closing all occurred in four days.
On Wednesday the principals signed the deal that had consumed most of my working day for the past four months. Signing took place in another time zone, and K and I were kept busy after hours merrily finalizing the document we sent to our foreign counterparts. And after the celebratory woo-hoo when we shot out our last email, K stopped by my room en route to the elevators.
“Share a cab home?” he asked. “Can’t,” I answered. “Working for F on other equally urgent affairs.”
“What?!?!” K said. “You’re still not going home?”
“No,” I sighed, and returned to working on Big Important Things.
On Thursday morning K arrived to see me on the floor, papers radiating from my supine form.
“I’m going to teach you something very important,” he said. “‘I have no capacity.’ That’s a direct translation from a Norwegian phrase, and I hear it all the time. Use it and it will save your life.”
I have no capacity. Brilliant. Because it really is true: I have no capacity, in any arena.
On Friday K’s good morning greeting was accompanied with: “I need you to drop everything for the next ninety minutes and work on this.”
“K, I have no capacity,” I said.
“Of course you do. I taught you that, so you can’t use it on me.“