A Thousand Different Subtleties

Is it me, or is there an irritating spate of lawyer related advertisements these days. Ok, I'll bite, I've only got nineteen minutes left on this computer and I really need to get this done. When I get the internet at home, I'll do something thoughtful, maybe even funny. But until that day, curses! Suck it up.

Anyway, lawyers. There are a lot of them, or their minons, or whatever, on my TV. And its starting to make me a little annoyed. Numerous people tripping down endless flights of stairs or throwing themselves into the road for cash. To quote the great Withnail and I.

"Look at that. "Accident Blackspot"? These aren't accidents. They're throwing themselves into the road gladly. Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness."

Alright, I'm not having a go at people having accidents or taking multinational corporations to the cleaners for giggles. I'm just getting fed up of the amount of commericals I have to sit through inbetween not watching The Gilmore Girls and not watching Desperate Housewives on E4 or Dave or whatever. As background noise goes, something about insurance brokers and claims lawers really gets up my nose. Example*?


"Directline have the cost of tradesman insurance nailed down..."
Followed by
"At Injury Lawyers for you..."
Followed by
"Have yout taken out a loan, credit card, or morgage in the last five years. If so, you could be entitled to compensation due to mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance, or PPI"
Followed by
"Directline now offer landlord cover, because normal home insurance doesn't cover rental properties..."
Followed by
"Have you had an accident in the last three years that wasn't your fault?"
Followed by
"Thousands of people have been mis-sold PPI..."
*This actually happened

Not even my almost constant abuse of alcohol manages to kill that many braincells in so short a space of time. It is as ludicrious as it is depressing, knowing damn well that you've not had an accident you can cash in on a no-win-no-fee basis and yet labouring under the assumption that every other poor sod in the country has fallen off a roof sometime in the last three years. It's enough to drive you mad. So mad, infact, that you begin to notice all the different sublties between the adverts.

One company raving about PPI offers "Up to £5000 pounds or more!". How can it be up to and more than something? That makes no sense to my puny non-legal brain. Another PPI-er offers "around £7500 pounds", presumably because it consists of better lawyers than the other guys, who can't even formulate coherant sentances. One definately-not-fictional couple even got about twenty grand for mis-sold PPI. Lucky them.

Also, something about the Injury Lawyers for you advert makes me chuckle with the surest onset of madness everytime it comes on. The fact that it opens with a serious man telling us that "We are real layers" and "100% lawyers" makes me think that somewhere along the line, they weren't being taken seriously - thus the need to stress that they are, infact, actual lawyers. Perhaps the idea of the clown lawyer wasn't been taken seriously. The 100% lawyers comment just reminds me of the Birdseye "100% beef" burger promise, making me simultaneously amused and hungry at the same time.

And finally, perhaps someone should tell the electrician that falls down the stairs in one of the dozen compensation adds that he is actually responsible for his own fall. Who leaves cables at the top of flights of stairs? Could be the electrician that subsequently trips over them. Then again, the idea that sometimes people are just *that* stupid might be too terrible to contemplate.