Another dead baby?!? SUE THE PARENTS.

The next person who tells me I should go to the doctor for my various ailments can pay the $400.00 bill I just received from the place that did the completely unnecessary x-ray on my neck.

I'd love to know precisely what the $600.00 per month in health insurance pays for, because apparently it does not cover medical procedures.

We Yanks have a bad reputation for suing anyone and everyone for stupid reasons. I admit much of it is excessive, but to be honest, the vast majority of lawsuits are necessary. And its because of insurance that they are necessary.

Let's say you're down the shops doing a spot of grocery shopping. You're looking for the parsnips so you can make a parsnip maple cake, and so you're not really paying close attention to the floor. Then you slip on some wet tile and a 100th of a second later you're arse up in the middle of the produce section.

A simple slip and fall that takes less than a second can seriously eff you up. I know people who have broken hips, fractured legs and arms, cracked ribs, cracked their skulls, shattered kneecaps and collarbones, dislocated their shoulders, and torn more muscles and tendons than you even knew you had.

So you fall in the supermarket and BAM you break two ribs, get a concussion, and tear a rotator cuff. You have fallen and you cannot get up.

Since your injuries are quite serious, you may get taken to hospital via ambulance ($700+). (bet you thought that was free, didn't you?) In the emergency room, they will check you over, treat whatever breaks they can ($800+), maybe keep you overnight because hey you broke a few bones and got concussed ($10,000 per night, PLUS at least $300 per day for every nurse that glances in your general direction, and at least $600 per day for every doctor who reads your name on a chart). And that torn rotator cuff? That will probably need surgery ($10,000 for the anesthesiologist, $1,500 each for everyone else in the room, plus all of the aforementioned hospital costs).

Torn rotator cuffs are kind of a bitch. You'll need physical therapy or something similar ($1,500+ per appointment, and you'll need to go a few times a week in the beginning). You may need more surgery ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$).  More physical therapy ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$). Prescriptions, x-rays, MRI's, specialists ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$). All because you slipped on a wet floor in the supermarket.

When everything is finished, you will be receiving medical bills (and probably collection notices by then) in upwards of $50,000.

But that's what insurance is for right??!!?!?!? All those medical professionals will put those bills through your insurance, and your insurance will cover the bulk of the costs.

L O L

Your insurance company will cover nothing. 

except maybe you and your loved ones with hellfire

So you are left with 2 options--find a nice cardboard box to live in, or sue the supermarket.

We do a lot of these cases at work, and they settle for an average of $50,000.

After your trials and tribulations resulting from that fall in the supermarket, you probably will not see a cent for at least 2 years. By the time you go find a lawyer, you are in unholy amounts of debt, being hounded by hospitals and collection agencies and doctors and their lawyers multiple times a day by phone and mail and your credit is not even in the toilet, it's in the 7th layer of hell.

So you have no choice but to get a lawyer and sue someone. Most of our clients don't even get to keep the majority of the money we get from either settling or trying their cases--most of it goes towards the their medical bills, and on average, they walk away with about $5,000 for themselves. 

Y'all want to know another legal secret? Of course you do. :)

America's criminal justice system is a thing of wonder and hilarity. A good chunk of our practice is criminal defense, and probably two thirds of our criminal clients are repeat offenders. Nothing awful, mostly drug dealing, DUI's, petty theft, and drunken fights that turn into assault charges.

You would be AMAZED how many people we've gotten out of serious drug and DUI problems with naught but a stern warning and a small fine. How, you may ask? 100% of the time, it is because the cops making the arrests are idiots with zero common sense. 

I have nothing against the police in general (at least not the ones around here). But guys come on. A ton of them in multiple towns were dumb enough to completely botch breathalyzer tests that a five year old could perform, thus rendering the results of that test inadmissible in court (pretty much every single DUI we've gotten dismissed). Dumb enough to give false information to hospital personnel in order to get a blood test without a warrant (all evidence thrown out, cases dismissed).

Dumb enough to plant evidence on someone in front of EIGHTY witnesses. We sued the police department and the prosecutors office for that, and won. The prosecutors office and the police actually had to hand a large sum of money over to a drug dealer, it was epic.

I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are; we're looking up "money laundering" in a dictionary.

Office work, as I'm sure many of you know, is fraught with a number of unique dangers.

Like manila folders.

Y'all know how a paper cut feels. Paper can do a surprising amount of damage, especially to dry skin.

Any of you ever experience a manila folder cut?

OW.

I've had accidents with kitchen knives that have caused less damage. Once a manila folder got me between my thumb and index finger--it wouldn't heal for weeks.

I'm pretty sure every office has the rogue filing cabinet.

Something gets screwed up in its innards and thus the cabinet won't open and close properly. In one of my old temp jobs, there was a filing cabinet that could only be opened by repeatedly hitting it with a hammer.

In my current office, the rogue filing cabinet will actually try to kill you if you attempt to open the top drawer. It acts like it's going to cooperate at first, and then right when you let your guard down

the freaking thing tries to slit your wrists.

(The metal pulley things upon which the drawer should rest are broken, so at the last second they tend to ricochet right out of the drawer in the general direction of your face.)

The supply closet is just as perilous. We have done the same thing to the supply closet as I have done to most of the closets at home. 

 Because all three of us in the office are midgets, we cannot reach the two highest shelves, or the top of the filing cabinet. So naturally instead of placing things neatly in those high places, we just throw stuff up there and hope (1) that we will never need to get it down again; and (2) that is stays there on the first try.

Things shift around a bit every time someone opens or closes the door, or opens the filing cabinet drawers, or rearranges the things on the shelves that we can reach until eventually

We keep the hammer in a better place now, hanging on the shelves.

Then there's that one coworker who leaves gross smelly food in the fridge for weeks and ends up making the whole office smell like a sewer.

Idk what it is with gross food smells, but it's like the food left in the fridge or the garbage will lie dormant and odorless for days, and then one morning you open the office door and WHAM you're hit with the stink of a dead body.

Bosslady is constantly leaving food in the office. CONSTANTLY. Bossman has yelled at her for this. I have yelled at her for this. I have thrown 2 sets of [apparently] expensive tupperware into the dumpster. Because NO.

 And yet she still continues to leave disgusting things in the fridge and in the garbage. 

And of course, there's the Russian Mafia.

Which I cannot discuss in detail, or I'd have to kill all of you.