That is what it takes.

Not three minutes and a phone call.

I sat in the courtroom in New Haven for the sentencing and I want to record two things about it, because they are the two things nobody tells you about the day you have been waiting nineteen months for.

The first is that it is unbelievably boring.

There is a docket.

You wait.

Two unrelated matters go first and one of them concerns a man being sentenced for something to do with a mail-order business, and his mother is in the row in front of you and she cries, and you sit there with your own catastrophe in your lap and you have to be a person in a room.