And to top it all:it was half-day early closing

Now to business.
I was not going to wait for this solicitor character to start. I checked up on him with Freddy Kruger, and discovered that he was in fact a highly reputable professional with little inclination for shenannigans.
I rung his office and got palmed off by a secretary.
He must have been primed, or they were lying and he had never heard of me.
So I wrote to him.
I told him some truth.
Veruca Salt
5

4/01/2005

For the attention of J**** O*******,
C/o *********,

W.Yorks.



Dear Mr. *********,

I have sent you a copy of a letter I sent to one of your clients a short while ago.
I am doing this because I have learned from a third party that you are a reliable and upright professional who can be depended upon to maintain proper archives and records.

The letter concerns a claim regarding some Intellectual Property.

Oddly enough, because I am working six days a week and have very little money, and am unable to engage a solicitor of my own on a formal basis, I posted this letter on a public website with the names removed( except the company name), to have it witnessed.

A mislaid letter can easily be denied, but one in the public arena can be pointed out should the need arise.

Curiously, the other party concerned, claims to have discovered this letter on or shortly before New Year’s Day, and demanded to have it removed from this free, public site.
They cited the possibility of action on your part.

Obviously, once I had enquired into your professional status, the need for public display vanished and I was happy to oblige their demands in every detail, even to the extent of contacting ‘google’, the search company, to request that they purged their ‘cache’ records.

I don’t know whether your clients are aware of this, as they appear to have blocked e-mail access(possibly).
Please accept this copy of the original letter for your own records with my compliments.

Yours Sincerely,

Veruca Salt,

I still have not heard from this person.
Meanwhile, I heard from Perky.
Please accept my apologies if you have received returned emails that have been previously been sent by you to me on the *******************email address. I have recently purchased some anti spam software which returns all spam sent to the above email address to its originator. In previous emails that you have sent, you must have used the word spam either one or more times in your subject header and as such your email address was included as a sender of spam.

I have since deleted the return instruction from outlook express and you should not receive any more returned emails from me.

Apologies once again.

Perky

I'm sure they were surprised that I had contacted their solicitor.
I doubt that they were pleased that he now represented an official record of my letter, better than any website.
It is not possible to say whether the 'spam' nonsense was a lie or incompetence.
Apparently she needed an engineer after all.