The day I quit from law school is the day I won my life back. You see I’ve been a consistent honors student ever since pre-school until my days in college. I was a solicitor after I graduated and decided to pursue my studies in the law to become a barrister.

My whole life was ahead of me. I could see myself being called up by important people asking for legal advice, given special treatment wherever I may go, and most of all, earn a hefty paycheck every time I win a case. Who knows? I may have even been elected to Parliament.

Nevertheless, I cut my dream short the moment we talked about car accident claims in class. We talked about this case, the name of which I refuse to divulge, in which the person who was injured by a rushing van lost his car accident claims. As I found out, since he was the one who was technically at fault since he was crossing the road not at the pedestrian lane or by looking carefully at the road, he did not merit the compensation he was asking for. The person who injured him, who happened to be quite an obnoxious man, even had the gall to demand him afterward, arguing that being demanded a claim against was “emotionally traumatic.”

That was the time I knew I was not fit to be a barrister. This is not because I am squeamish at all. I have three pet tarantulas and I recently bought a new bulldog. Rather, my problem was with the legal interpretation which our justice system takes for granted. Apparently, in the positivist tradition, the tradition which largely dominated our country’s jurisprudence, the law must be followed to the letter, except in extreme cases.

The one which shocked me was not one of those cases. Thus, the injured person not being given a break by our lawyers, he had to suffer a legal defeat in addition to his physical pain. What bothers me about this is that it appears as though our legal system has lost touch with morality, as if we could dispense with the ideas of good and evil, so long as we obey the law literally. Moreover, it also seemed to me that our justice system has forgotten that the law is supposed to harmonize relations in society. This is not at all what I think it does.

So I left law school and started studying medicine. My parents, who are paying or my tuition, are not at all too happy about my change of heart. But I know deep inside, they love me too much to ever bear a grudge.

Some people just don’t know how to be decent.

Last week my friends and I were having an innocent ride down London. But before we could even start our conversation, some bozo who had been driving an SUV as slowly as a tractor stopped moving unexpectedly in the middle of the road, causing us to hit her vehicle lightly. Now, to make matters worse, instead of asking for our apology, she even had the audacity to threaten filing a No Win No Fee car accident claim against me and my friends! Said we gave her whooplash or something. And that she would teach us all a lesson.

We snickered, “We don’t know about you granny, but it looks as if you’re the one who needs a lesson—a driving lesson, that is!” And we laughed ourselves to death.

We were ready to quit (our green van wasn’t damaged or anything), when we saw the woman taking down our car’s plate number. We didn’t think much about it at the time. In fact, we left the woman driving to some police station, while we went on to enjoy ourselves at my girlfriend’s party. It was a good day.

Which quickly turned into a bad one. A few hours after arriving at my girlfriend’s house, my parents called me up and told me to go home. When I did get home, after sobering myself up a little (it’s not a party unless you get some booze on, right?), I discovered to my horror that the little cat actually was not bluffing and did go on to file a No Win No Fee car accident claim! And not only that, she was demanding no less than 10,000 pounds for her injury! “The nerve of that dwarf,” I said. I argued that even if we did injure her, we should not be asked for that much amount, for her injury was merely a light one and her car was not badly damaged at all. Nevertheless, she argued, when my parents did get to talk to her, that the bulk of the amount was meant to compensate not her physical injuries, but her “emotional” and “psychological” ones.

“What the—,” I said, “Surely, this must be a joke! We live in Great Britain, for Christ’s sake. We don’t tolerate this kind of drama here. We’re not Members of Parliament! This woman is not the Queen! This isn’t some Narnia!”

But the dwarf got her wish. For some reason my parents and my friends’ parents paid her in full. Now, we’re all grounded for a year. So much for a happy spring break.