Compulsive

It's after 3:00 AM, and I'm eating a Fluffernutter, winding down from the long day of work. It's more tedious legal research — I find the web sites of select law firms, and attempt to gather information about the employees. Most important is the e-mail address. For some firms this is easy, and all of the information I need is part of a large listing that I can just copy and reformat. For others, it's not so easy, and I'll have to look at each individual entry (which often means looking at several hundred individual entries.) Then there are some I can skip entirely, when the email addresses are cleverly hidden ― most likely to prevent someone from doing exactly what I'm trying to do.

It's not particularly interesting, not by any means. It can even be a bit taxing. But it pays reasonably well.

It had already been a long day when I was ready to close for the evening, a few hours ago — but, I thought to myself, I'll just check this one last firm, to see what it looks like, and if I can finish it up quickly, I will. And when I did, I checked the next one on the list ― and then the next. And then the next, which wasn't quite so easy, but I did it, anyway.

And suddenly, it's after 3:00 AM, and I'm eating a Fluffernutter. (I'm not sure how this work became such a compulsion.)