17/04/2026
It’s fortunate that we all don’t have to be good at everything all the time.
Having spent over 30 years in practice as a solicitor locally I am grateful that clients still ask me for legal advice; the ladies in the office still want to work with me; my children still speak to me, and that the flowers in my garden are much admired by Gary who does the lawns and says that I am wasted in the law and should be organising the Chelsea Flower Show.
These are all positives. However a big negative in my life is technology. My relationship with technology is not the best it could be. Last Friday the ladies and I spent an hour when the phones were quiet reminiscing upon my issues. There are quite a lot of them and I am not going to list them all but here are a few examples for comedy purposes only:-
1. I called Irene recently:-
“You’ll need to come up: there’s something wrong with my computer – it keeps flickering.”
Irene:- “That’s because your folder is leaning on the return key.”
2. Yesterday I called Georgia:- “There’s a moon on my phone and I can’t get it to go away, please can you come up and help?” (it was my do not disturb that I had knocked on by mistake).
3. I was conducting a webex court hearing not realising my IPhone was connected to my MacBook. The phone went off in the middle of the Hearing and the screen went blank. I swore; threw the macbook at Georgia who reconnected me. I then carried on with the opposed motion hearing and immediately thereafter Georgia called the sheriff clerk as well as the agent on the other side to check whether or not I was heard and if so to apologise.
4. A court hearing in Stranraer and some of the evidence was downloaded onto a pen drive “Hannah you’ll need to come with me, I’ll never be able to cope with the technology.”
5. Sandi was recently clearing out her emails and came upon an email from me to her in 2016 just after we had entered into our partnership agreement:- “Please can you put my out of office on for me?”
6. Can we talk about clicking? When I open an email, I like to click on the mouse twice. I just do. It makes me happy. However, it turns out if you do that too often you have hundreds of opened emails and your computer crashes!
7. Sandi reminded me recently about the time I brought the battery for my leaf blower into the office. It’s a pest if you can’t keep the house steps clear of leaves. I couldn’t make out how to charge the leaf blower battery, and so the ladies helped me.
8. I have just been told after about six years of logging onto webex court hearings that you don’t actually have to type the individual meeting code and password into the computer. If you click onto the link, it just happens!
I’m happy to end with a positive and to share some of my garden flowers with you, so you can see what Gary means. Banana skins in the watering cans make all the difference! Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.
Jennifer Colledge (Partner)
