One day, when it is safe, I will write a brilliant novel about my job. In the meantime, I am writing a handbook for my successor, a work that will guide the neophyte through the strange and murky waters of my occupation.

"Here," I will say, bestowing wisdom upon some international bright young thing. "Read this. You are going to need it."

In this book, there will be chapters on net neutrality, warrantless wiretapping, RIAA lawsuits, and workplace privacy! There will be chapters on patents and neat little flow charts detailing the elements of defamation. My replacement will learn to explain packet forging and data splitting with grace and ease. Some wide-eyed creature will learn to dread Rossi v. The Motion Picture Association of America and how to tell the 4th Circuit from the 9th.

Some of the chapters may be more pragmatic: the location of the mailbox keys; the care and feeding of the voicemail system; how to fix the front door when it is stuck; chasing down the postal worker who seems determined to avoid contact with us at any cost; the location of the best coffee and the cheapest burrito.

Finally, there will come the most awesome and eldritch lore, subtleties of this job that can only be learned through months of non-stop communication with people who may or may not be insane, diving into a river of sewage and plucking out the perfect, pertinent, on-message test case.

There will be crazy people. Oh, what crazy people there will be. Please refer to Figure 1a, which charts the levels of craziness in your Inbox against the phases of the moon. Feel free to abruptly end any conversation that includes the following elements: RFID chips implanted in the jaw, Mossad agents installing surveillance equipment in dental work, microwave mind control, or a fixation on people repeating phrases that "they only could have known if they had been listening in on all of my phone calls." Feel free to ignore any written communication that is composed entirely of newspaper clippings and/or form letters from Senators or Congressmen. Single-spaced, handwritten letters have, to this day, been a 100% certain sign of craziness, but they deserve at least one reading. Feel free to stop reading if the writer claims that their plea is hand written because of they are at the center of a government conspiracy that makes it impossible for them to plug in any electrical appliances.

It may sometimes be difficult to distinguish the crazy people from people with a highly creative understanding of the law. You may find yourself patiently explaining that no, the First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to have your site indexed by Google. The First Amendment also does not guarantee the right to communication between a man and his truck. Conversely, you may have to explain that the First Amendment does protect the right to speak anonymously. You may have to explain that as much as we disagree with existing copyright laws, downloading copyrighted material without paying for it is not legal and may result in your being sued for downloading Big Tit Anal Whores 6. Then you may have to act surprised when you learn that you could have purchased terabytes of porn for what it costs to settle the Big Tit Anal Whores 6 case out of court.

Sometimes the people will not be crazy and they will have a fine understanding of the law. Sometimes these people will come to you with interesting border search cases. In this situation you must remember that no matter how promising the case may look, you need to ask two questions:

1. When the bad people searched you, did they find anything?

2. If so, was it child porn?

For reasons that pass beyond my understanding, computers being searched at our borders are simply riddled with child porn. I don't know where all of this child porn comes from. Child porn is a deal breaker. You may feel free to find other people to help defend this person's 4th Amendment rights, but this is not your golden test case.

Oh, there are so many things you do not yet know, young non-profit worker. There is so much left for you to learn, and I will tell you all about it as soon as I get off of the phone with this irate right-wing radio fan who is asking me why I hate America.