Day 24

The way we have to deal with dealers when we go to buy a car is about the same now as buying a house.  There is so very much paperwork that to me is a whole lot of redundant information worded in just a little different way.  How did something so simple in theory become so difficult?  Sure you need the price of the car and how much you are going to pay for it.  They need a copy of the insurance to make sure it is covered and your driver’s license to know that you’re legal to drive it.  They may need your credit report to make sure you will pay for it but after that the rest of the paperwork is all about what some other paper pusher decided that they needed to make sure that you could not sue them.  We have become a litigious country and most would say it is about lawyers and the generation of business they do for themselves.  I want to tell you about a lawyer that helped to save my life and never charged me 10 cents.  I was sick with cancer and I needed a bone marrow transplant to stay alive.  My insurance did not want to pay and neither did the company I worked for but this is about Mark.  Mark Macy was the name that was on the bottom of a list of lawyers that the hospital where I was trying to get the transplant at that might be able to help me fight the huge company I worked for and also had insurance with.  I had called the lawyers above him and they all wanted money just to talk to them.  Big money that I did not have.  The top end guy wanted $1,200.00 and the bottom buy wanted $400.00.  Both were out of my price range as I was sick and not working.  Then I made the call to Mark.  He had told the hospital that if someone needed help to get the treatment that they needed then they should call him because they had also saved the life of his wife and he was in their debt morally he felt.  I called him as the last hope and he was so very nice to me.  I explained my situation to him and he said that I should come in to his office to talk.  I was worried that I would be wasting my time as well as his and I said I did not have any money to give him for my service.  He said not to worry about that just get over to see him.  I went and was taken into this very nice office.  Then I got to meet Mark.  If someone were to play his part in the movie of my life I would pick a young Robert Redford look alike to play him because that is just what he was blonde hair with blue eyes.  Any way we sat down to talk and he asked about me and how I had gotten to this point in my life to come to see him.  I am sure that he was concerned at the size of the companies that we were up against but he had assured me that we would do our best to get it done.  The company I worked for was the local phone company and at the time was a huge corporation.  The same for the insurance that they carried with another big company.  The company I worked for had assembled eight New York lawyers to fight me in court and I am not so sure of the number of men that the insurance had as well but needless we were outnumbered.   I left his office and felt better because I was assured we would get this done.   After my union meeting Mark was the one that had called me to let me know that I was going to get the treatment that I needed and he had stayed up late to make sure that I knew what was happening because my Union had threatened to go on strike.  I was never so happy to hear someone’s voice to say those words because now I could just concentrate on getting well and trust me it was not fun working that treatment.  I thought that one day I would get a bill in the mail for the payment of the lawyer fees but it never came.  Mark Macy never charged me a thing and just helped me because it was the right thing to do.  I can never have a harsh word for lawyers or make jokes at their expense because of all this.  If our world was filled with more people like him then we might just have a little better place to live in.