Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

So this reminds me of an amazing situation during a deposition for a case involving voice actor Vic Mignona suing some people because their tweets and calls[0] caused him to lose work. So a guy called Ron Toye is being questioned over some tweets and Ty Beard (the lawyer conducting the deposition) just needs to get him to authenticate that some tweets are his:

Ty Beard: Look at all these pages, are these all your tweets?

Ron Toye: I don't recall making them, but that's my twitter handle yeah

TB: Are those your tweets?

RT: It looks like it, yes

TB: Yes? Is that a "yes"?

RT: It looks like it, yes

TB: I need you to say yes or no [1]

RT: ... or it looks like it

So this goes on for pages, the frustrated lawyer (who appears to be pretty poorly equipped to handle the situation) being given the runaround by just A Guy. There is a really funny discussion of this - including more of the deposition transcript - in the ALAB podcast's episode "Weeb Wars Pt 2" @ https://soundcloud.com/alabpodcast/episode-5-weeb-wars-pt-2 (deposition chat starts 28 minutes in, lasts 10 minutes). It even escalates, it's great :D

edit: to be clear, I think the person being stupid in this scenario is Ty Beard, not Ron Toye :D

[0] - arguably Vic Mignona's own general creepiness caused this, but these guys tweeted about that

[1] - he really doesn't

I didn't listen to the podcast, but let me play devil's advocate for a second. For most people, tweets are fire and forget, and they can't remember everything they've ever posted. If a lawyer hands me a binder with 38 pages of tweets, I don't know where he got them. If it turns out a tweet on page 15 was doctored, and I say "yes these tweets are mine", then I just confessed under oath to something I didn't do. In that position I would answer questions in good faith, but I would also never confirm anything under oath unless I was damn sure it was the truth.

I'm sure this attitude would piss off a lot of lawyers, but lucky for you I'm not a white collar criminal, so you don't need to worry about meeting me in a courtroom.

I totally agree with you

Even longer articles/blogs/research notes/etc. I've probably written thousands of them. If someone asks me if I wrote one, especially one that I didn't have final editorial approval over, the best I could probably say in many cases is that I vaguely recall writing something like that and it seems to reflect what I believed to be true at the time.

Ditto for verbal communications. I had a call with a lawyer at a vendor once asking me about a conversation I had with a reporter. (Not a deposition.) As I recall :-), my answer was along the lines of I know the journalist in question and have spoken to them many times and I vaguely remember being briefed at some point by the $VENDOR in question on $TOPIC but I have no idea who I spoke with or exactly when it was.

I used to run a blog where I just posted helpful articles because my article would be better than whatever else was out there. Think: "Renewing your passport" or the like, but for my country.

I'd sometimes Google an issue and end up back on my own website reading an article I forgot I already wrote.

I used to work for a software company known for it's militant transparency. I'd often come across a technical problem that I wanted to solve so I'd open a public issue on the problem and plan to come back to it a week or two later. Inevitably when I did get around to starting work and ran a search the top hit would be my own public issue.

Yeah,

All the things that article describes as "evasiveness" are what I'd describe as taking into account the messiness of the world. I mean, I might remember being at a restaurant with people and deciding to go to a show with them. Did I actually go to the show? I don't know, maybe I changed my mind on the way if I have no memory of the show or maybe I did go.

A lot of the article seems about ways to bully people into making "obvious" conclusions, stating things definitely when they are not, in fact sure of their answers and so-forth. And a lot of tactics are about the common sense of language. "Surely you'd remember X if you in fact did it" "Come on, either the situation had X quality or it didn't" etc. In contrast to this intuition, I think there are quite a few studies on memory and language having some inherent fuzziness to them.

Edit: in defense of the parent article, it's writing in an assumed context of professionals operating according to standards. In this context, people have both an obligation and a series of reminders to be exact in their memory of events and the events themselves should be more cut-and-dried. The real problem is someone expects this standard of exactness to carry over to casual human activity (writing, tweeting or socializing).

There is a similar story about an office worker not knowing what a photocopy machine is.

The New York Times did an amazing reenactment from transcripts of the legal deposition

https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE

Here's the fuller story: The Cuyahoga's Recorder's Office charged $2 per page... even when it was simply a CD full of documents. That literally meant they were charging over $200,000 for a single CD of publicly available documents. The companies that needed these documents were understandably frustrated. That's why they sued. The recorder's office spent $55,000 of taxpayer's money defending themselves... and they lost.
The person refusing to acknowledge what a photocopier is, was Lawrence Patterson. He was head of information technology for the recorder's office, and even after the loss of the case was still working for the county on a salary of $65,000(!).
The lawyer questioning him was David Marburger. He pointed out afterwards that if the recorder's office had just accepted the more reasonable sum of $50 per CD, which the companies suing the recorder's office had offered, they would have made $25,000 -- instead they lost $55,000.
Marburger has said of the video that the emotions were all wrong: "I actually wanted [Patterson] to keep up what I perceived as a charade. Once he chose the path that he took, I didn't want a straight answer; I wanted him to keep it going. That was why I kept pushing over the course of 10 pages of transcript. To me, the testimony became too good to be true. It was perfect."
He also said that Patterson wasn't the slightest bit intimidated in real life.

Marburger used the absurd testimony to win the case, and the court unanimously agreed that they only charge $1 per CD moving forward. -- thunderpeel2001

I knew exactly what "jargon" the IT worker was going to use, and I've never worked in an office like that. Of course, I assumed he was being pedantic at first. If a lawyer only needs to find a government office worker that has lost his mind to win a case, it's just not fair.

I loved that scene. It features the fantastic but tragically underused John Ennis, most famous for his work on Mr. Show.

I remember when it came out, I felt like the Verbatim series was really well done, but it was surprising coming from the NY Times since it was so outside their wheelhouse. It seems like they abandoned it pretty quickly but I wish someone more like Funny or Die would pick up the idea.

I worked in a place that had two very different machines with two very different functions that used the same colloquial name “Photocopy Machine” and “Photo Copy Machine”. I have to say, I would have been obstinate about which was being referred to in that case if disposed.

Oh come on. If you were any bit cooperative you’d say “yes” or “yes, we have two machine we call photo copy machines, but we use them for different things”

That’s volunteering additional information and you should not do that in a legal proceeding, deposition or in court.

> he really doesn't

That's the thing, after all: the guy is obligated to give true answers, not answers that would be convenient for the lawyers. There's no requirement that you make their job easy.

Absolutely

Nothing will ever really top Bill Clinton's “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

I guess you can follow up with something like “what are some reasons it looks like it to you” and then follow that trail.

OK, so it's your handle. Do you ever tweet? Who tweets on your account? ...

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