True Stella Awards #71
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01-27-2006, 11:20 AM
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Lotsa places, currently Metro D.C., USA
Posts: 13,574
True Stella Awards #71
From "The Stella Awards" newsletter...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PUERILE POTTY PRANK
Bob Dougherty, 57, says someone smeared glue on the toilet seat at the Home Depot store in Louisville, Colo., in 2003, causing him to stick to it when he sat down. Paramedics had to rescue him by removing the seat from the toilet. It's not a funny prank at all: doctors had to virtually rip the seat from his ...um... seat. The prankster was never found.
"This is not Home Depot's fault," Dougherty declared afterward. But he says he was so distressed by the incident that he's had nightmares and had to see a psychiatrist, and two years later still avoided public places. Thus, in November 2005 he sued. But if the prankster wasn't found and the prank was not Home Depot's fault, whom did he sue? Home Depot!
Why? Because, the suit says, he called for help for 15 minutes before an employee finally heard him and came to his aid. Plus, the store should have provided paper toilet seat covers in the restrooms that they provide for free to the public.
Yet there was toilet paper there; if he was concerned about what might be on the seat, why not wipe it down with that? Then surely he would have discovered the sticky mess without sitting on it.
The resulting public humiliation, he said in one of his scads of interviews with newspapers and national TV shows, is awful too. "This is going to kill me," he complained. "My life is shortened as it is." Of course, he didn't get worldwide publicity over the incident; he got it by suing.
When the case hit the newspapers, a man in a nearby town claimed that Dougherty had been in a similar predicament there. Dougherty denied that claim, and took (and passed) a polygraph test to back up his denial.
Despite not being at fault, Home Depot graciously offered Dougherty a $2,000 settlement. That amount was decreed "insulting" -- Dougherty's suit demands $3 million. Objective readers can surely think of a good word to describe that.
SOURCES:
1) "Test Indicates Dougherty Never Made 2nd Glue Claim", Rocky Mountain
News, 10 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71a
2) "Stick It To Them", Denver Rocky Mountain News, 11 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71b
OVERWROUGHT
Barnard Lorence managed to overdraw his bank account. The balance was less than $5 below zero, but mean old First National Bank and Trust in Stuart, Fla., still charged him the standard overdraft fee that it had listed in its fee schedule: $32.
But... but... BUT! The bank says it CARES about its customers! So Lorence asked the manager to reverse the fee. The manager not only said no, but was "rude" about it, Lorence claims. He thus filed suit over his "stress and pain" and loss of sleep over the fee, which only $2 million would help him get over. (A few hundred thousand bucks, he says, will only amount to a slap on the wrist, whereas $2 million is more like being
"paddled".)
Lorence filed his suit himself, without an attorney, using the basis of "false advertising" (that the bank cares) for his claim. Of course, this is the guy who managed to overdraw his own account all by himself, so let's hope the bank will be able to beat the rap.
SOURCE:
1) "Man Upset about Overdraft Fee Sues First National Bank", Palm Beach
Post, 10 November 2005 (no longer available online)
---
NETFIXED
The CD-rental-by-mail firm Netflix allows you to get as many DVDs as you can watch in a month, subject to the delay in turning them around by mail. So if you have the three-disks-at-a-time deal, and you can get them in the mail quickly, you could theoretically watch dozens of movies in a single month for the flat rate of about $18 if you had nothing better to do.
The word Netflix used to describe the deal in its advertising was "unlimited". Not so, argued one customer. He claimed he could only see about 10 disks a month under the plan, so (not having anything better to
do) he not only sued in San Francisco County Superior Court, but he sought -- and received -- class action status to sue on behalf of every one of the firm's customers. Netflix quickly settled without admitting any wrongdoing. The deal: the company will upgrade all customers to a higher plan for free for one month. The catch: unless they downgrade after the first month back to the plan they were on, they'd stay on the more expensive plan and would be charged that plan's higher price from then on out. And presumably the company will stop saying "unlimited" in their ads. That's it! That's the settlement!
Well, not quite: the company also agreed to pay the lawyers who sued it $2.5 million. The Netflix customers who were supposedly "misled" by the Netflix ads get no money -- not even a brief discount on their current or past service. The settlement is so bad that another customer, Chris Ambler, set up a web site, NetflixSettlementSucks.com, to file a formal objection to it. More than 1,000 Netflix customers have joined in objecting to the settlement, even helping to fund a court challenge.
"This is a very good settlement," insists plaintiff attorney Seth Safier -- the guy who gets to split the millions of dollars with his partner. "It addresses exactly what the plaintiff was complaining about."
Few agree with the lawyer with dollar signs in his eyes: the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission has joined the objection, and so has Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, an association of class action attorneys.
I've long maintained that most lawyers are honorable and decry the damage done to their profession's reputation by a minority of their peers; it's about time that the majority stood up and demanded change.
SOURCES:
1) "The Netflix Fix Is In", MSNBC, 15 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71c
2) "FTC Objects to Netflix Settlement", Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10
January 2006
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71d
---
SOMETHING FOR NOTHING, DEFINED
When Stephanie Michelle Conley took out an insurance policy on her car in 2001 from West Virginia National Auto Insurance Company, she paid her premium by check. The sequence: she wrote the check on Aug. 15; the company issued the policy on Aug. 30; on Aug. 31 Conley was in an accident, resulting in $26,000 in damage; the check was returned by Conley's bank unpaid -- it "bounced" -- and the company sent her a letter on Sept. 11 saying her policy was canceled as of its start date. That is, of course, how contracts work: when one side doesn't do their part (like pay the agreed-upon fee), the other side doesn't have to do theirs.
Yet Conley sued the company because she wasn't given "adequate notice"
of her lack of auto insurance, even though most banks not only will notify account holders of bounced checks, but charge a hefty fee, too.
Incredibly, she won her case in Cabell Circuit Court, and the insurance company appealed it to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Even more incredibly, in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled 4-1 that the insurance company was at fault for not giving Conley 10 days' notice of her policy's termination, and that she deserves coverage for her accident even though she never paid the insurance premium.
The ruling is "one of the most outrageous court decisions in the history of American jurisprudence," said one case participant. No, those aren't the words of the insurance company, but rather those of Supreme Court Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard, the one who dissented from the ruling. He called it a "something for nothing" case "where someone, somewhere, somehow must owe them money simply because they have suffered an injury."
In his written dissent he lectured the other judges, saying they "had to work hard to write an opinion that actually does everything that the law should not do. It punishes the innocent by causing honest, hard- working West Virginians to pay higher auto insurance premiums. At the same time, it rewards the guilty by providing a windfall to those who never paid for insurance coverage."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
SOURCE:
1) "Car Insurance Ruling Raises Concerns", Huntington Herald-Dispatch, 10
December 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71e
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PUERILE POTTY PRANK
Bob Dougherty, 57, says someone smeared glue on the toilet seat at the Home Depot store in Louisville, Colo., in 2003, causing him to stick to it when he sat down. Paramedics had to rescue him by removing the seat from the toilet. It's not a funny prank at all: doctors had to virtually rip the seat from his ...um... seat. The prankster was never found.
"This is not Home Depot's fault," Dougherty declared afterward. But he says he was so distressed by the incident that he's had nightmares and had to see a psychiatrist, and two years later still avoided public places. Thus, in November 2005 he sued. But if the prankster wasn't found and the prank was not Home Depot's fault, whom did he sue? Home Depot!
Why? Because, the suit says, he called for help for 15 minutes before an employee finally heard him and came to his aid. Plus, the store should have provided paper toilet seat covers in the restrooms that they provide for free to the public.
Yet there was toilet paper there; if he was concerned about what might be on the seat, why not wipe it down with that? Then surely he would have discovered the sticky mess without sitting on it.
The resulting public humiliation, he said in one of his scads of interviews with newspapers and national TV shows, is awful too. "This is going to kill me," he complained. "My life is shortened as it is." Of course, he didn't get worldwide publicity over the incident; he got it by suing.
When the case hit the newspapers, a man in a nearby town claimed that Dougherty had been in a similar predicament there. Dougherty denied that claim, and took (and passed) a polygraph test to back up his denial.
Despite not being at fault, Home Depot graciously offered Dougherty a $2,000 settlement. That amount was decreed "insulting" -- Dougherty's suit demands $3 million. Objective readers can surely think of a good word to describe that.
SOURCES:
1) "Test Indicates Dougherty Never Made 2nd Glue Claim", Rocky Mountain
News, 10 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71a
2) "Stick It To Them", Denver Rocky Mountain News, 11 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71b
OVERWROUGHT
Barnard Lorence managed to overdraw his bank account. The balance was less than $5 below zero, but mean old First National Bank and Trust in Stuart, Fla., still charged him the standard overdraft fee that it had listed in its fee schedule: $32.
But... but... BUT! The bank says it CARES about its customers! So Lorence asked the manager to reverse the fee. The manager not only said no, but was "rude" about it, Lorence claims. He thus filed suit over his "stress and pain" and loss of sleep over the fee, which only $2 million would help him get over. (A few hundred thousand bucks, he says, will only amount to a slap on the wrist, whereas $2 million is more like being
"paddled".)
Lorence filed his suit himself, without an attorney, using the basis of "false advertising" (that the bank cares) for his claim. Of course, this is the guy who managed to overdraw his own account all by himself, so let's hope the bank will be able to beat the rap.
SOURCE:
1) "Man Upset about Overdraft Fee Sues First National Bank", Palm Beach
Post, 10 November 2005 (no longer available online)
---
NETFIXED
The CD-rental-by-mail firm Netflix allows you to get as many DVDs as you can watch in a month, subject to the delay in turning them around by mail. So if you have the three-disks-at-a-time deal, and you can get them in the mail quickly, you could theoretically watch dozens of movies in a single month for the flat rate of about $18 if you had nothing better to do.
The word Netflix used to describe the deal in its advertising was "unlimited". Not so, argued one customer. He claimed he could only see about 10 disks a month under the plan, so (not having anything better to
do) he not only sued in San Francisco County Superior Court, but he sought -- and received -- class action status to sue on behalf of every one of the firm's customers. Netflix quickly settled without admitting any wrongdoing. The deal: the company will upgrade all customers to a higher plan for free for one month. The catch: unless they downgrade after the first month back to the plan they were on, they'd stay on the more expensive plan and would be charged that plan's higher price from then on out. And presumably the company will stop saying "unlimited" in their ads. That's it! That's the settlement!
Well, not quite: the company also agreed to pay the lawyers who sued it $2.5 million. The Netflix customers who were supposedly "misled" by the Netflix ads get no money -- not even a brief discount on their current or past service. The settlement is so bad that another customer, Chris Ambler, set up a web site, NetflixSettlementSucks.com, to file a formal objection to it. More than 1,000 Netflix customers have joined in objecting to the settlement, even helping to fund a court challenge.
"This is a very good settlement," insists plaintiff attorney Seth Safier -- the guy who gets to split the millions of dollars with his partner. "It addresses exactly what the plaintiff was complaining about."
Few agree with the lawyer with dollar signs in his eyes: the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission has joined the objection, and so has Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, an association of class action attorneys.
I've long maintained that most lawyers are honorable and decry the damage done to their profession's reputation by a minority of their peers; it's about time that the majority stood up and demanded change.
SOURCES:
1) "The Netflix Fix Is In", MSNBC, 15 November 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71c
2) "FTC Objects to Netflix Settlement", Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10
January 2006
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71d
---
SOMETHING FOR NOTHING, DEFINED
When Stephanie Michelle Conley took out an insurance policy on her car in 2001 from West Virginia National Auto Insurance Company, she paid her premium by check. The sequence: she wrote the check on Aug. 15; the company issued the policy on Aug. 30; on Aug. 31 Conley was in an accident, resulting in $26,000 in damage; the check was returned by Conley's bank unpaid -- it "bounced" -- and the company sent her a letter on Sept. 11 saying her policy was canceled as of its start date. That is, of course, how contracts work: when one side doesn't do their part (like pay the agreed-upon fee), the other side doesn't have to do theirs.
Yet Conley sued the company because she wasn't given "adequate notice"
of her lack of auto insurance, even though most banks not only will notify account holders of bounced checks, but charge a hefty fee, too.
Incredibly, she won her case in Cabell Circuit Court, and the insurance company appealed it to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Even more incredibly, in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled 4-1 that the insurance company was at fault for not giving Conley 10 days' notice of her policy's termination, and that she deserves coverage for her accident even though she never paid the insurance premium.
The ruling is "one of the most outrageous court decisions in the history of American jurisprudence," said one case participant. No, those aren't the words of the insurance company, but rather those of Supreme Court Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard, the one who dissented from the ruling. He called it a "something for nothing" case "where someone, somewhere, somehow must owe them money simply because they have suffered an injury."
In his written dissent he lectured the other judges, saying they "had to work hard to write an opinion that actually does everything that the law should not do. It punishes the innocent by causing honest, hard- working West Virginians to pay higher auto insurance premiums. At the same time, it rewards the guilty by providing a windfall to those who never paid for insurance coverage."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
SOURCE:
1) "Car Insurance Ruling Raises Concerns", Huntington Herald-Dispatch, 10
December 2005
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect5.pl?71e
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