The room had fluorescent lights and an oval table and chairs that were slightly too low. the kind of institutional furniture designed to communicate efficiency rather than comfort. There was a picture of water in the center of the table. Nobody touched it. The panel consisted of three people. A woman in her 50s named Barbara Ye, who was the commission’s senior dispute officer, a man named Harold Puit, who handled legal compliance, and a younger man whose name I don’t remember, and who seemed to be there primarily to take
notes. On one side of the table, James Whitmore and myself. On the other, Derek and the attorney they had hired, a man named Steven Garland from a firm I did not recognize, whose suit was expensive and whose confidence had the particular quality of someone who has not yet realized they are standing on the wrong side of the facts. Garland went first.