A Brief Biotchfest

My vacation begins tomorrow. I'm going to avoid negative thoughts for several whole days. Before doing that, I have a couple of things I need to get off my chest.

Personally: My car is infuriating me. They say you get what you pay for. They lie. My little Ford Ranger cost about $10,000 brand new. It's been in the shop once - because I snapped the tailgate handle off. It was a cheap repair. My BMW 540 cost about $55,000 new. It's been in the repair shop about 6-10 times per year. Most recently: for a blown fuse that froze the ignition and caused the "transmission failure" light to go on. The part costs four bucks, but the diagnostic tests were $110, and the time to diagnose was more than 24 hours.

Professionally: If you aren't a lawyer, this will not interest you, but I have a greedy little client who is driving me nuts. We won his trial last year, securing a judgment which, before attorney's fees, was about ten times what he was willing to settle for before trial. Even after trial, he was willing to settle for about half of that amount. We recommended that he stay the course. It was the right advice. The court awarded all of our costs, plus almost double the underlying judgment amount in attorney's fees (we put a lot of time and effort into the trial). We have a fee agreement that provides for a percentage, but also provides that if we recover a large fee award, that we will accept the fees awarded by the court and paid by the defendant, and the client keeps 100% of the underlying judgment. That sounds like a win-win, right? Not for this guy. He has tried at least five times to get us to reconsider our greedy position and share the attorney's fees with him. We refused. Now he wants to keep the award for costs, and not pay us back. He thinks that is fair. The defendant is paying him the full value of his entire claim, and he will pay no costs or fees out of pocket to get there. And that's not good enough. It's enough to make you wonder if clienticide is a word.

Publicly: This news story has sent me off to the dusty CD racks. That's me in the corner...that's me in the spotlight... losing my religion. An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot eat wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained no wheat, violating Roman Catholic doctrine. I hold it to be self-evident that if God made her that way, God would not have a problem letting her have Holy Communion with a rice wafer. The Bible doesn't say that wheat is required. Jesus didn't say wheat was required. In fact, I'm pretty confident that Jesus would be okay with this little girl's First Communion. The fact that my church thinks that her God-given lot in life makes her ineligible for communion causes me to doubt whether my church has any clue about the true path to God. Am I right? I wonder what Bainbridge thinks of this story.

There. I've said it. Now I can vacate.