Mediatin'... So I had to engage in a mediation for my job today....→[More:], which had me really freaked out. But, oddly, I kind of loved it. This was over an employment dispute and I can't describe any details. And it was kind of a downer in some ways. But in others, it was absolutely fascinating. It was like being in the middle of an unpredictable strategy game, a contest of wills and cleverness, of gradually revealed information and of calculated risk. There was a lot of going back and forth with messages written on paper, a lot of tense waiting for response, and in between, a lot of philosophizing from our lawyer on how these things go and how people act and what the aim is.

It kind of left me wishing that there was a way to play this as a video game, so that there really wasn't anything real on the table. I can't imagine a game that would be smart enough, but if you could play the lawyer in some sort of dispute between big companies, or a company and a union, and try to negotiate the best deal for your client, that would be awesome. You could play a good-guy hero lawyer trying to squeeze every dime out of of a rotten polluter, or you could play an shark working toward your next Rolex by exploiting little grannies. It would be a very interesting game - almost a choose-your-own adventure with infinite outcomes.

Clearly this brought out something in me I didn't know was there.

I know some of you do this for a living and it's probably got its utterly miserable side, particularly with family law. But because I was not personally liable and because we were in a very good position, I didn't have to sweat it too much and was able to enjoy the strategic aspect.