Just a minute before I was about to push the “publish” button for the piece that follows, I got a call from Dinkes & Schwitzer. No, it wasn’t Marc Mauser. Apparently he won’t talk to me any more. His paralegal called. She had two things to say.
First, she wanted to e-mail me the closing statement. That’s the closing statement I’ve been requesting over the past couple of months, without getting a single response from Dinkes about my request. Woo-ee.
Then, ever so efficient, she asked for my e-mail address.
These are the lawyers who have been representing me (and receiving, although not answering my e-mails) since January 2008. And now, today, she needed my e-mail address.
Flashing before my eyes was the case list binder I kept when I worked for lawyers. The one with every client’s information, updated regularly. Pages and pages of each client’s information. I had fax numbers for copy shops near clients who didn’t have faxes, or computers. And every lawyer representing those clients had copies of those lists.
I gave the Dinkes paralegal my e-mail address. She warned me it had to come via e-mail because it was a “confidential” document. Is Dinkes suggesting that if I tell you, my Sidebar pals, about it I will have breached some kind of something?
Then she said that Marc had told her to ask me for the last letter I received from Medicare, with the final amount of the Medicare reimbursement. That’s the one I worked on over several months and many hours, without a peep from my lawyers, although I kept asking them for a peep or two.
Now, when I hear a request like this over the phone — a request which, as you all know, I fulfilled last week, even before it was a request, and had posted the letter I wrote to Marc, enclosing the Medicare stuff — well, doesn’t it make me think they are maybe reading Sidebar and deliberately asking me for information ex post facto? Maybe as a way of demonstrating how on top of this they are? Even though I told them repeatedly that I was doing all the work?
Maybe they think they’re going to confuse me.
Not. I told the paralegal I’d already mailed the letter with the enclosed documents last Saturday. She said, oh, well, um, and then actually said, “Well, if we don’t get that letter, I’ll have to ask you to send those documents again.” As if, what? I’m lying?
Oh, they’ll get that letter.
So now, let’s go on to Do you have a valid grievance against your lawyer? No, no, I’m serious. Really. I wrote it before I wrote this little note.
Do I hear you laughing? Me, too.