“We thought you we’re a myth. Do you know how long we’ve had this?” the man says, producing an envelope marked “For that 8th grade boy on his field trip.”
Do you in fact have nice tits?
That was probably it.
Oh it was you, Jim_B!
Old Mrs Bassingthwaite from the Court Reporting Bureau was still talking about you till the day she retired, about five years back now.
Frankly given what you were doing I’m surprised you’d bring up this subject. Shameless!
[Seriously though, from someone who has been in court regularly for 30 years, she was concentrating and probably wasn’t aware of your existence]
An experienced court reporter is very proficient at keeping the transcript. If what’s being spoken is fairly routine, it is not uncommon for their mind to wander a little bit, so I don’t think it’s so hard to believe that she was looking at you in particular for some reason. When I clerked at a trial court, the court reporter would often ask me whether I had noticed little nuances or reactions from various parties, attorneys and spectators. Sometimes it was just little gossipy things, and sometimes it was something that had some small significance, like a person who had arrived late or left early.
I am quite sure that what she was writing was what was being said in the courtroom, not any sort of personal observation about you. I can speculate that if she was leering at you, she was leering for one of the reasons anybody would leer at anyone. Maybe what was being said was a little bit colorful, and you had a noticeable reaction to it. Maybe she thought you were cute. Maybe she thought you were doing something weird, or thought you were reacting to her looking at you in a way she found interesting. Or maybe she was just bored and looking around the courtroom and zoned out a little and accidentally looked at you for uncomfortably long.
No way it went down like this in Michigan in 1981.
After all, it would have been “We had some junior high kids watching today…”
Anyway, maybe she was watching what the creepy guy behind Jim_B was doing.
I hope I don’t get an Aerosmith earworm from this thread.
There was a court reporter in a school gym locker
When I noticed she was looking at me
“Nice shirt. I wonder if it’s from Sears? Maybe I’ll stop on my way home to see if they have it in my son’s size.”
You looked just like her son who’d run off the year before.
Husky Boys Department
Possible that when the participants get a little too animated with their statements/questioning/objections that it distracts the reporter from what they are saying. She may have trained herself to look away from the commotion and focus on a spot on the wall behind the spectators box. Or find someone in the room to focus on who is doing the opposite of being animated. Like a little boy just sitting still.
Court reporters train to become one with their machines and sometimes they zone right out. As @Hampshire points out, when transcription becomes challenging, such as when people overtalk or interrupt each other, they focus hard to keep all the sounds straight. That might involve inadvertently fixating on a person in the room.
One court reporter with whom I worked for years could do her job while practically asleep. This once resulted in an amusing episode. It was a horrendous criminal case, 23 counts of rape. The trial was over, the judge was giving jury instructions after lunch in a warm room so the case could be delivered into their care.
Judges often fall into the bad habit we all have of speeding up when they read information aloud. This judge was reading like a machine gun. The reporter knew the instructions by heart. A full tummy and the heat of the day had her fighting sleep. Her head flopped around like a broken doll as her fingers automatically punched the keys on her machine.
Suddenly, her right leg convulsed in a hypnic jerk. Her pump flew off her foot in a lazy arc, landing a couple feet from the jury box. The judge didn’t notice. He was intent on finishing his reading project. But the jury was transfixed. I’m sure they never heard a single word the judge read to them as the court reporter performed a gradual scuttling show across the well to retrieve her lost shoe.
She never missed a single keystroke.