A funny little thing...about 10 years back I'd accidently misplaced a bill from the bookstore for 10 bucks and the shop automatically had their lawyer write me for the money. Now in Denmark there are some rules...among others that a lawyer cannot threaten with legal action for stuff under 100 dollars. Therefore I was amazed to see that he had included a "fee" of 99 dollars to bump it over the limit.
I of course always pays my bills so i grabbed the phone and called the shop - as always they are the soul of courtesy and I explained about the missing bill etc... I offered to drop by and pay it at once and did so.
So while I am paying it to the guy at the counter, I remark that the lawyer had put the fee on the bill and if I had to pay that too - and the guy at counter went "?"
I showed him the letter, he vanished out the back...came back 2 min later and asked me to join him in the holy chambers of fantasy litterature in Denmark (
www.fantask.dk ) - it was good coffee....he called the lawyer while I was sitting there....and sacked the sucker while I was choking on my coffee with words such as "Thieving scumback, swindler and fired" being more modest that most others.
Turned out that the shop didn't understand why so many of their regular customers had stopped comming and that again turned out to be because the lawyer was swindling people by adjusting the "fee". As the guy remarked to me:
-"Jesper, you've spent nearly 8.000 dollars on books and cartoons so far ( i was 23ish...a lot more today sigh ) and this guy wants to drag you to court for 10 dollars - how did you think we would react.
I still shop at that place once or twice a month :-D