HUMOR
After All, I’m Not a Lawyer
I just fix computer stuff
In the mid to late eighties, I helped a Boston lawyer with his office computers. I saw “Boston lawyer” because his ads were plastered all over the Boston subways even though his office was outside of the city.
He and his staff were using an early Tandy Computer Xenix multi-user system with what we called “green screen” dumb terminals then, though the older green text had been replaced with white.
His lawyers and paralegals used a character based Word Perfect program to prepare documents.
Harvey, the face of the firm, the man whose name was all over the Boston subways, was telling me about a problem they were experiencing with Word Perfect. I thought about the symptoms, and believed I had a fix. However, it wasn’t a simple fix, and I couldn’t be sure I was correct. I could call Word Perfect, but they’d charge for the call.
While we stood in the midst of his employees, I explained this to Harvey, noting that whatever Word Perfect charged me would be added onto my hourly rate. He could, of course, call them himself, if he wished, though he might have difficulty implementing their fix. I also warned him that my guess about the problem might be incorrect.