The Space at the End of a Sentence.

Have you ever spent the better part of an evening searching for ". [space]"?

Otherwise known as the space at the end of a sentence, which, for whatever reason, in my world must be exactly two space bar pushes?

At the Job, if there is a sentence following a sentence there must be two space bar pushes in between. Not one, not three. Two. If there is a new section, or if it is the end of a paragraph, the rule doesn't apply. There may be some other formatting issue, or a tab involved, but not specifically anything about spacing. BUT, in between sentences that do go together to form a paragraph? Two pushes of the space bar (which appear on your screen as two small dots floating in mid-air.) Hanging. Just sitting there. A pause.

Unfortunately, whoever first drafted the particular document that I was working on this evening was not a fan of the pause. Clearly they must have been a fast talker, one who rarely takes a breath between thoughts because peppered throughout the document were sentences with merely one space bar push before the next sentence.

It was one big gobbledygook of dominion account provisions thrown together in much the same manner as the text read ridiculously quickly at the end of a car commercial.

Did the younger associate who worked on this agreement before me and failed to update defined terms, yada, yada, yada, correct this microformatting glitch? Of course not. So, it was left to me, after midnight to sit and search for ". [space]"

Not to mention taking out all of the instances of the article: "the" before any proper name used in the singular (another one of our stellar formatting conventions).

Now, don't get me wrong. I am being paid for all of this. But is it any wonder why lawyers are high strung? One spends years of training memorizing all kinds of minutiae and it all boils down to ". [space]"

Pause. Breathe. Space. Space. Next sentence.