How long will this wicked community grumble against me?

Reader-submitted complaint: Megan, reading your blog, I have to note your disclaimer has a hole in it. Maybe you're expressing the opinions of some organization you do NOT now, nor have ever had any affiliation with.

What are you, a lawyer?

Oh.

I suppose this is possible. Likely, even. Wait a minute, what's this leading to? I don't have time for a deposition, and I can't afford to hire my own lawyer. Now I'm second-guessing myself.

What I mean to say is that over the course of hundreds of posts, it's quite likely that I've said something that happens to match the official position of any number of organizations I'm not affiliated with.

Hmmm. Maybe that doesn't make sense. Maybe I've accidentally used a word that you are planning to use in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against me, my ISP, Blogger and the Apple corporation. I definitely can't defend myself against something like that. I'm the little guy here!

I put the disclaimer up a few months ago when I started to get more hits. It's your standard-issue "this is a private blog that's not related to my work" disclaimer, although I've tried to have a sense of humour about it. I think it's pretty clear that this blog isn't related to my work, but nowadays people tend to put disclaimers on their blogs. Disclaimers definitely aren't bulletproof, but in general, it's better to have one than not to have one.

I wrote my disclaimer myself after thinking about the type of people who would be likely to feign confusion about the purpose of my blog. I did not discuss it with legal counsel, so it probably does have a few holes in it that could be exploited by people with no ethics, intelligence or basic sense of human decency.

Oh God. I need a lawyer.