Friday the 13th
2023 has two months on the Gregorian calendar that have a Friday that falls on the 13th day of the month. Those occur in January and October this year and western superstition deem them to be unlucky days. The history of this unlucky heritage seems to stem from Norse mythology and focuses around a dinner party among twelve of the Norse gods that was crashed by Loki, the shape-shifter god that has been a part of the Marvel series as one of the sources of evil in the world. Loki was the 13th member of the dinner party and brought the affair to an unfortunate conclusion. I recently wrote about the basis of the duodecimal system or Base 12 system that forms the foundation of our timekeeping from the lunar calendar, which rotates through 12 cycles (more or less) in a year to the number of hours in a day (12×2) to the number of minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute (12×5). I mentioned that some think it is supported by the twelve knuckles on our digits (4 fingers x 3 knuckles each) as a justification of why people gravitated towards it as a measure of time, donuts and now, good fortune. I can’t completely reconcile why a thirteenth donut that comes from the kindness of the baker’s dozen got turned into an unlucky thing by virtue of it falling on a Friday.
Christians connect Friday the 13th with the fact that there were 13 attendees to the Last Supper on the eve of the Friday of Jesus’ crucifixion. When you look at the distribution of dates on the seven days of the week, there is a strange fact that there are slightly more Fridays that fall on the 13th than any other day of the week. There is always one per calendar year and there can never be more than three, but they are always only a few months away at any time. History tells us that for the last two millennia since Christ’s death, Friday as been considered an unlucky day. We know that thirteen is an odd enough number, especially in relationship to the duodecimal system, that it too bore a degree of unlucky attribution. Combine the two sources of bad luck and make it happen more often than any other calendar coincidence and voila! Friday the 13th. Now throw in a horror movie franchise by the same name and the die has been cast.
This is a transitional day for me that I am spending here in NYC, killing time at the request of two litigation cases on which I have expert witness assignments. The first I have spent the last four days preparing for and doing a deposition. Today they are deposing the opposing expert and want me to be near at hand on the phone. We have agreed that I will charge the client four hours of time for keeping myself available. This is not unlike the arrangement I had on another litigation a few years ago where I was on hold every Friday for several hours in case the arbitrators wanted to ask me any questions about my expert testimony. I have another case that is in mediation today that I was asked yesterday to comment on the mediation statement to lend support to the litigators position themselves as well as possible in the mediation. I spent three hours making those comments on the thirty-page statement last night and I stand ready to take a call from them today if they need me during the mediation. That is perhaps another four hours of standby time that I will bill to that client.
Since I teach ethics, I have forced myself to think about the ethics of these arrangements and here is where I have come out. If I was billing eight instead of four hours (even if the deposition or mediation go on for that long), that would feel excessive since there is clearly less work involved in being on call than in a deposition or mediation. I think I could charge for that legally since my contract with both says that I can charge for travel or on-hold time, but I feel charging half time is more ethically appropriate. The fact that I am placing myself on hold for both on the same day is the next ethical question. Since the two are only on-call situations and I assess the odds of having them conflict to be very small, I feel it is OK to be on call for both on the same day. It also makes me feel better to be charging them both only half time or for four hours. I can righteously say that I am not double billing my time, but rather giving the two clients the benefit of a self-imposed sharing arrangement which I have devised. It is what I would do for travel expenses if both wanted me to be in town at the same time. It so happens, only one of the two needed me in town, so they are bearing all the travel costs. I also have the right by contract to charge them for my travel time (which when added up totals about ten hours each way from San Diego), but am not doing so, except for the time on the inbound flight that I used to do several hours of deposition prep. In sum, I feel I have found the right balance on the ethics of billable time for my clients, something that is relatively new to me and which I take seriously. I love billing for my time and am well aware of the slippery slope of padding of timesheets that can occur, so I pay attention to the issue since I feel that I am fortunate to be as well paid for my time as I am and I do not want the burden of thinking that I may have over-billed any client. I actually do think about these things…all the time.
I am spending my day with my phone close at hand and regularly checking my email just in case either of my two legal teams need to reach out to me. The worst imaginable thing would be be on call and then not be reachable at the moment of truth. That would undermine all my elaborate ethical positioning. I have walked across town and back, putting a couple miles on my iPhone pedometer, my exercise bible these days. I have had no particular purpose other than the breakfast I had with an old friend and the dinner I plan to have tonight with Gary and Oswaldo and their NYC friend. It’s a lazy Friday and I have an early flight in the morning, so my job today is all about just laying low.
It seems strangely appropriate that I find myself watching Sideways on TV as I while away the afternoon. Watching the guys wend their way through Santa Barbara County wine country is far more familiar to me now that we have explored the area in the context of our California Mission expedition. Ive actually been to most of the places they pass through even if I’m not a wine drinker. I always find the story of a man hitting his midlife low-point very poignant. We all have those low points and the trick is to muscle through them.
I am not so much a superstitious person, so I never give much thought to things like Friday the 13th, but when it does occur to me I find myself thinking that its better to be laying low and not doing things like flying that seem to tempt fate. There is now officially very little harm that can come to me today. In fact, I don’t plan to leave the Club at all. I think its fair to assume that I’m closer to being off call at this point. I will email just to be sure. I then just have to ease into the dinner hour, hoping that G&O arrive from LA on time. After dinner it will just be early to bed and then before I know it, my 5am Uber will be at the door, whisking me off to JFK for Mt flight home. I will have survived another Friday the 13th and can look forward to 9 months of. Good fortune until another one rolls around.