HileThoughts

I have long decried the foolishness of our litigious society. This week I was offered the opportunity to benefit from such a suit.

I received an official postcard offering me money because I had a first generation iPod nano. First I was slightly irritated. The day before I had talked to the repair center where I sent my recently broken nano. The cost of repair, $125, the cost of a replacement $133. So I told them to pitch my old unit. Not wanting to completely forgo the offer I read further and fond that in fact I did not need to actually have the nano. Great – free money!

So I settled in to read the fine print. All that I was required to do was to agree to the following statement.

Yes my nano did have scratches. The shiny backing was no longer pristine. As a mirror it was not as distortion free as the day I took it out of the box. Yet did this scratching “impair my use or enjoyment of my iPod nano?”

It is an audio device! In using it I listen to the podcasts it contained (never did use it much for music recordings). So no, the scratching did not impact my listening. What about my enjoyment. Well I suppose that if I thought of is as “my precious” and spent my time stroking its immaculate features my enjoyment would have lessened. But my enjoyment was based on using it at the grocery, while waking the dogs, while cutting the lawn, while driving to Jefferson City, …. So that was a no as well.

I did consider that by not checking the box I was enabling other members of the class to get my portion of the settlement $s. By so doing I would increase the reward to people who file foolish law suits. But even that seemed like a cop out.

So, call me foolish, but in the end I could not bring myself to check that box. What would you have done?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.