suitably, that other shoe should drop from a very great height

A scenario, absolutely and entirely hypothetical and bearing only the most coincidental potential resemblance to any recent news story:

Let us imagine that you hold a respected legal position. One day, you drop off, say, a pair of shoes to the local cobbler shop to be repaired. Returning the next day, you discover the shoes have been misplaced and cannot be returned to you. What do you do?

Obviously, you sue the cobbler's shop for, oh, tens of millions of dollars. You can cite some absurdly specious reading of a state law concerning consumers, along the lines of, you know, the sign said "we will strive to make you happy" and, since what would really have made you happy was the attractive young woman behind the counter taking you into a storage closet and [censoring] your [deleted], which didn't happen, each day it doesn't happen is worth another grand or so.

You pursue this case through the courts for years, refusing to settle, costing the cobbler shop (which, of course, was never worth anything near the millions of dollars you sued for) thousands in legal fees.

I am trying to imagine the vindictiveness, the bloody-mindedness, the sheer turbocharged assholery of character it would take to pursue this case. I mean, what did this shop ever do to you (other than temporarily lose one half of your pair of multimillion dollar shoes)? Did the owners sodomize your puppy with a cobbler's last while forcing you to watch? Did they put rubber glue in your baby daughter's talcum powder?

One might argue, in fact, that insofar as you apparently had no idea that your actions were at all wrong - given that you pursued them, publicly and persistently - even though they clearly interfered severely with the cobbler shop's business and imperiled it financially, as well as caused great anguish, distress, and probably humiliation for its owners, your actions indicate a severely diminished capacity to distinguish right from wrong - to the extent that if the shop were to countersue you for damages, you should plead insanity. Certainly, if your legal position involves, say, evaluating people's actions and entering judgment upon them, you have pretty clearly disqualified yourself from such a position - if only because anyone subject to your judgment in such a situation could point to this very lawsuit and suggest that you're not fit to judge a cowflop-tossing contest, much less a legal decision.

I'm only glad we live in a world were such an absurd scenario remains only hypothetical.