Fireworks

I haven’t written a lot lately.  I love writing, but at the moment there are a few things happening in my life that I don’t really want to write about.  Frankly most of it is just so negative that I would send you into a depro if I wrote about it.  And to lose the last few committed readers that still dare to venture onto this blog, would be a fatal blow to my waning popularity.

In short, a friend of mine bamboozled me out of a lot of money, and I am in the process of demanding justice.  This process is quite intimidating and complex, not to mention costly, and may in fact not have the required end result, which should be justice. 

I’ve always been one of those suckers who continue to believe in the idea of fairness and justice.  And I still do.  A little bit.

Although I know a few good decent people in the legal industry, I have to say that in general, lawyers are a bunch of blood-sucking thieves, and even when you do have a good case that should go your way, the costs of getting this through court basically reduces your ability to act in any way.

Most of the lawyers I contacted at first, just wanted to go the easy way and create a paper-war.  They want to sit in the office being a pen-pusher, in stead of actually taking the matter to court.  And they literally charge you in 6 minutes timeslots.  When you go over into the 7th minute, you’re out of pocket for another 30 or 40 bucks, depending on the amount of personal debt this lawyer has to cover in order to sustain his expensive lifestyle.  They’re worse than engineering consultants. 

And why not?  These are the folks who end up being judges, members of parliament and other kinds of high-rollers, and they draw up our laws – why wouldn’t they create a system where they are the beneficiaries of other people’s bad luck?

Even though I was totally able to draft and send off my own “final letter of demand” to the debtor, most of the lawyers I contacted insisted that I write a letter of demand on their letterhead, which would apparently have a much better effect than my personally written one, which I simply got off the internet. 

For this great service a company like Ah*rns Lawyers (Full Name withheld to protect the innocent) would charge you $440.00.  What a farce.  Even after I repeatedly stated that I had already sent off a letter of demand, and that I now wanted to proceed with real legal action, M*rc#s Ah*rns still insisted that I first send off another letter on their letterhead.   According to him:

“…I recommend a letter of demand from our firm. It will threaten the claiming of costs and interest and carries a lot more weight than your letter as it shows you are serious as you have engaged solicitors.”

There’s nothing in there that wasn’t in my original letter.  Except a huge cost to print a piece of paper with their colourful letterhead on it.

This, of course, was after Mr Ah*rns took more than a week to respond to my first request for assistance. 

I finally got hold off a legal company who seems to have a lot more integrity.  They responded to all my emails in a speedy fashion - they even arranged the first meeting for free.  I was free to discuss my whole case with a lawyer, and could then decide what to do based on their advice.  If you live in Perth, I would highly recommend Havilah Legal if you ever need to talk to a respectable lawyer.  Check out their website.

Anyway, this still doesn’t mean that I’ve received any of the money this scumbag has stolen from me, but at least it’s a start.  One day when the whole matter has been done and dusted, I will tell you the exact details of what happened.  For the moment, I’ll leave names and details out of this to protect the guilty.

Anyway, last weekend we attended the annual Fireworks at Hillarys, and I took a few nice photos of the events.  Fireworks seem to be part of my life for the moment: