Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Free Legal Advice

Our friend, A, came today to clean and do some laundry, which helps me out because there is less chance for me to fuck up in that respect. It is worth the cost to have a built-in excuse. I can say, "Oh, that sweater? A must have done that."

And that excuse has been extended to whatever else might be damaged, broken, or otherwise out of place (except computer problems, which we blame on Mark). So, the mysterious fracture and repair of the concrete Boxer's front leg was obviously accomplished by A.

Today, she came bearing legal problems for me to solve. This is an ever-increasing sore spot with me. She has a feud with her credit card company and a certain huge multi-national internet service provider about some unauthorized charges to her credit card.

There are some charges for purchases in Florida, which her two college students visited over winter break. But, you see, her kids would never do something like that without permission. But people who work at AOL would. "They do things like that," she said.

Now, I'm not saying that A is wrong. Stranger things have happened, like her one kid driving through the closed door of the volunteer fire department through no fault of his own (it was dark and the driveway did look a little like the road) or like the same kid driving his motorcycle on the interstate without a license (how was he supposed to get to the trail to ride the motorcycle?), among other things.

I admit that I have given her legal advice in the past on many occasions over the years without demand or expectation of monetary consideration. We're friends, right?

Here's the deal. I'm the one who told her to go to the university's free legal clinic because her kid was a studentenrolled in the school at the time he signed the lease and I wasn't going to drive 3 hours one way for all the hearings to represent her when the landlord sued her because of something her son did.

I'm the one who told her she would win at trial and that she shouldn't pay the $3,000 the university's legal clinic lawyer told her to pay to settle. I'm the one who told her how to handle her lawyer so that he would understand that she wouldn't be bullied into settling and so that he'd make a money claim for her under the law against the landlord. I'm the one who explained why she would win, something her lawyer neglected to tell her.

She went to trial. She won. The court awarded her money.

She told me, while relating her woes with AOL and a Boston bank, that she and her husband were headed down this weekend to take her legal clinic lawyers out to dinner. After all, they spent a lot of time on the case and gave her good advice.

While A was whining, Stacey e-mailed me a request from work for Krispy Kremes. I left on the 45-minute one-way drive to Krispy Kreme. Before I got out the door, though, A did notice that I was getting "skinny." Too little, too late, A.

Posted by Bill at January 27, 2004 04:47 PM