respectfully request to our two minutes of rebuttal and conclusion time if i may give you and i thank you and your honor my law partner cynthia miller who is with me today will be presenting that to the court this court has the opportunity with its case to a literally throwing pearls by that we mean that each alleged act of discrimination is beginning with mr teacher's requests for dependent care leave that in april of ninety nine must be strung together so that the entire chain or in and the idea is to give the agency an opportunity to respond and for the administrative process to work its way out and one of the complaints about you or your position here is that that didn't happen and so the only thing we can look at is gender discrimination discrimination element was of your evidence and that it looked like what you presented was maybe that somebody didn't like the pal and he was treated more harshly than some other people in terms of a long time as a pattern of harassment to make the anti retaliation progress as we definitely have to bring together definitions to be able to do that but we still that's broadly  retaliation in another itself my position is that there are two problems with that one even though mr keach said he believed that he had been listed as a witness in a complaint that had been filed a couple of months earlier there's no credible what's the matter with that it's hearsay he did not see any document he does not know any document that was that and we didn't see any doctor actually did his deposition your honor which is in the record of pages forty two to forty four he never s document he never knew what document he was listed on and he did not put into evidence any document showing indeed that he was even listed as of late release that he wasn't i don't know your honor i haven't seen this woman's interview but you're planning to call somebody is a with us and somebody starts taking some funny action with them they decide not to cooperate with you saying that there's no interference or intimidating of witnesses but i think that's a different situation your honor the statute and the case action earlier rather than later should he have waited should he have checked another box possibly spell mr t h isn't a lawyer he readily admits that he didn't receive any legal advice that i'm aware of prior to filling out that complaint he did it on its own it never dawned on him a dat moment in time when he signed that action that it was retaliatory perhaps as an alternative to gender discrimination he knew something was wrong he knew he had been treated differently but it still has to be reasonably related in confidence of assessments of another problem i have a c e o seen notified him by a letter after the complaint was filed that think that this court broad definition are broad interpretation of the definition definition of average and when action speaks to that very point mr cage the the factual pieces here that we're asking you to string together are like are related to regard somebody call them gender discrimination or retaliation something was going on there and that's the question for the jury  this to string together a whole bunch of things but if you look at each one individually isn't each one susceptible of a view that is not an adverse employment action i mean the comic strip thing that an adverse employment action  gets a call saying that the guy's a bowling alley instead of being at home with his child but you're right that doesn't go to whether or not it's enough for me that's correct three it you have to look at the very fact of this case which is a question for the finder honor the fact that it is unusual it is is the very question for the finder of fact it was quite unusual for those kinds of activities to be  aimed at mr keith when generally speaking other employees were required those things and during that time these other evil actions were pending the postal service knew that there were complaints filed against them and that he w witness on the other side makes much out of the fact that we don't have any competent evidence showing that he was ever listed anywhere as a witness and all we have is his statement that we have no documents or anything else you haven't which answer to that yet here that was filed where he was looked at as a witness was his girlfriend at the time and is now his wife and that's how he says he was told he was listed as a witness we can infer that from the facts yes your honor is that yours and no because both w witness correct and and if we went to trial it would be admissible because yvonne cordell would be would be called to testify that yes she told him that and that would not be hearsay both retaliate against that's one component of it yes what evidence was there to show that the person who was doing the retaliation knew that he was listed as a witness by the very procedure your honor when i complained it filed a complaint with the c it immediately sent to the employer for response and that that doctor that is documented at that time so it was sent to the post poster yes sure and so we can infer from that that the person who's  recall the next case which is united states of america america versus j michael mcg