Someone recently asked me if I had ever been sued

Yes I have, but at the time I had the luxury of being so damned poor I couldn't even have paid attention.

About 30 years ago when I was starting my commercial fishing phase I did a little job on the south side of a guys rickety old house. There was a rotten deck made of pallets and other junk on the north side.

When he came home, the deck on the north side collapsed on him and he busted his leg. He tried to pass this off by saying that the vibration of my nailers and other tools had weakened the deck, which was a crock and handed it off to an attorney.

Of course, when he spoke with the attorney, he painted this picture that I was some kind of corporation like Morrison-Knudson and that I had pretty deep pockets.

The truth is that I was living in a camper trailer along what was then called Cannery Row.

My total assets were a rotten '62 Dodge 1/2 ton pickup, a few tools, a dilapidated trailer and a bag of laundry.

That was IT. Period.

When I was notified that i was beiing sued, I mulled it over for a couple of days and then called his attorney to explain that I was going to defend myself and that I wanted to settle out of court the following day. He scheduled me an appointment.

Then I put a set of clean clothes in my friends van and told him what I had in mind. He said he wasn't going to miss this for the world.

The next day, I fired up the pickup, hooked up the trailer and headed to the attorneys office, stopping en route to hand my friend my wallet and gave him the plan.

I parked in his lot, and grabbed my duffel bag of dirty laundry and walked in to his office.

He sat behind his desk triumphantly waaiting for me to write him a check of some sort.

To his astonishment, I pulled the title of the truck out of my pocket, signed it and put it on his desk. Next I emptied out the duffel bag and took off every stich of what I was wearing and dropped it on the floor.

"There. You got it all," I said.

Then I marched out of his office stark raving naked and the instant i got outside, my pal handed me a GI blanket to cover my nakedness, we hopped into his van and took off straight to the nearest bar.

I dressed in the van and walked into the bar where my pal shot his mouth off and told everyone what I had just done. Just about everyone in the place bought me a beer.

I was just finishing my first brew of what turned out to be a long night when the lawyers secreatary walked in and told me that her boss wante me to take my stuff out of his parking lot.

I had the barkeep put the beer sitting on the bar on ice for me and told everyone I would be right back.

When I got to the lawyers office, I saw my dirty laundry had been dumped into the bed of the truck and that the title was on the dashboard so I fired the old beast up and roared back down to the bar and parked the rig in an out of the way place where it stayed for several days.

For the next week I was unable to buy myself a single beer and I never heard one single word from that attorney ever again.

You can't take blood out of a stone.


my other blog is:http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/