Item 18 – Hiring a lawyer:
Last meeting, a dozen people were extremely frustrated with Texas Aviation Partners. I don’t think this is related to that. This is just some other guy, Shaune Maycock, who owns Blue Skies Aviation, and is out of compliance with a bunch of stuff. So San Marcos needs to hire an attorney, and Charles Soechting is up for the job.
But Maycock submitted stacks and stacks of papers right before the meeting. Max Baker finds and reads a line from a 2014 email, written by Charles Soechting: “As you know, I have no positive feelings about Shaune Maycock. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him.”
God, what a delicious line that is. You have to savor that kind of bitterness. Max Baker questions whether or not Soechting can be appropriately amicable and professional, given this enjoyable display of seething.
(This is right at the 4:00 mark, btw).
However, Soechting gets to talk, a few minutes later. And he finishes the paragraph that Max quoted. Immediately after Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him, Schoechting wrote “However, I have to have evidence. As you know, I’ve been to the repair shop and talked about how we were having difficulty with [some background on repairing planes, and stuff about how Maycock has cancelled a lot of appointments and been frustrating]… However, remember, what I said about evidence. We have to have evidence, and anger is not evidence. Being mad at someone is not evidence. The last thing I want to do is to see Shaune get off like he did with [a prior case].”
Do you remember the very old mid-90s scene from the Simpsons, where Lisa finds the alien’s book with the title, “How to Cook Humans”? And then the alien blows off some space dust, and the title is really “How to Cook For Humans”? And then Lisa blows off more space dust, and the title is now revealed to be “How to Cook Forty Humans”? And then the alien blows off even more space dust, and the title finally ends up being “How to Cook For Forty Humans”? It turned out that the aliens were good, and Lisa blew it by being overly suspicious of them.
I’m just saying, maybe Max could have blown off a little more space dust before reading that quote. The very next line provides some useful context, making the lawyer sound like someone who behaves ethically even when he can’t wait to sue someone.
Update as of 8/6/22: Shaune Maycock reached out to me, and he disputes the impression given by Schoecting in the quote above, particularly the part about cancelling appointments.
The San Marxist 