Names and Grades
May. 27th, 2011 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogOdd day in the communications section.
I got to Olean right on time for a 10:30 hearing, after an 8:30 a.m.stop in Elmira, which I'd tried to make late yesterday, to check on a case somebody asked me to take over. A quick review of clerk files revealed that the other side not only owns property down there, but has leased out the oil and gas rights from that property to various mega energy corporations.
♫Now this here's a story of a guy that Ray
Went down to look if he might be forced to pay
The previous lawyer mighta run into some fail,
But down in the ground is a frackin'-type shale....♫
(Marcellus shale, that is. Natural kind. Passin' gas.)
----
My client's case was second on the 10:30 Olean calendar (and took all of about 10 seconds), but when I arrived, my eye got caught by another familiar name a little further down on the calendar: I saw my own name- and not in the attorney column. My last name, anyway, which is relatively unusual, at least spelled the proper 17th century British way wot it ought to be.
I could tell from the notation that the gentleman was about to have his just-filed, self-filed bankruptcy dismissed because he didn't properly transmit his full nine-digit social security number to the court as required. When attorneys file cases, this magic number gets captured by software, encoded into a special clerk-only file, and transmitted through the electronic filing process; but when pro se debtors file cases, usually in paper format, they have to submit a goofy paper form that is absolutely mandatory and yet very easy to slip up on. That generated the short-notice Notice to this guy, telling him that his case was going to be dismissed if he didn't duly disclose All TheThings Digits.
An hour or so after the scheduled hearing of the motion in his case (and the original one in my client's case), I returned for an additional brief appearance in my client's case, and saw Dave, identifiable from the papers on his lap, sitting in the row in front of me. He shouldn't have still been there- his case would've been called minutes after I'd left- but there he was, and when the judge told the assembly that he'd finished all the Chapter 7 motions unless someone thought they hadn't been called, Dave didn't say anything. But I did- to him.
Are you here on the dismissal motion? Because if you are, you should get up and say something.
Sure enough, he was too timid, or overwhelmed, or something, but that moment of distant-relative connectedness I shared with him got him to speak up, and his full SSN handed in properly, to enable him to live another day in This System Of Ours. I told him why it had caught my eye, and that I'd wanted to help, despite us not being related. "Oh, I'm sure we are, ages ago," he replied, and I have to agree. In the world we share, where being kind and helping the needier are good things, I found myself perfectly relating, if not related to.
----
Having saved somebody else's bacon connected to our last names, I then got to spend part of my afternoon having my first name slandered.
After driving through still more nasty storms, claiming two days of mail and heading home, my cell rang with a BLOCKED call. Followed, before I could even answer it, by two more. Intrigued and a little annoyed, I finally answered it, and we had this exchange:
Phone: Is this Rayyyyy?
Me: Yes, can I help you?
Phone: Do you go to Coffee Culture?
(Note to file: that would be a reference to a local-at-least baristalike chain which I have been to, maybe twice, at their location two doors down from Eleanor's stomping grounds at Farmers & Artisans. I've been by, but never in, their additional venues in Tonawanda and, within a coupla hours just today, down in Ellicottville on my way back from Olean.)
Me: Sometimes, but.... who IS this?
Phone: This is Suzanne.
(Note to file, supplemental: more than five hours of brain-racking later, I can't remember ANYONE I've known named Suzanne since the one by that name who took pictures for my high school yearbook, close to 35 years ago. This voice sounded barely half that age range.)
Phone, before any further witty repartee from me: Click.
Moments later, after reporting this exchange to Eleanor, another blocked call came in:
Me: Who are you trying to reach?
Phone: Ray (my last name)
Me: Well, that's me, but I don't know any Suzanne from this century. Why are you calling?
Phone: This is your wife's assistant. Do you like to go to Tim Hortons, or Coffee Culture, or Dunkin Donuts?
Round now, I hear the guy in the background, giggling. Two and two begin to add, and I realize that either (a) I left a message somewhere for one of their parents, or (b) they misdialed my cell number (thus revealing my name to them) and they decided to have fun with me. It's been quiet since that second call, but I am now prepared to scare the living crap out of them with threats of phone company traps and calls to their parents- along with a blunt acknowledgement that I've been making prank calls myself for probably longer than their parents have been alive, and thus know not only how to make them but how to stop them.
Until that call, though, I'm enjoying the sound of crickets in the evening.
----
Then there's Emily's oddity; her grades from third quarter have trickled in, and have been genuinely good, with one unexpected exception. It was different enough from her expectation for her to email the professor in question last week to inquire about why. Earlier today, said professor replied with a semi-lame justification of the grading policies in question. These were fine; academic freedom and all that. What wasn't so fine, though, was that the prof also included, in the body of the email to Em, the full text of an email exchange with ANOTHER student, revealing the latter's grade, and the prof's justification of it, to both the other student and to Emily.
That sound you just heard was the Privacy Act of 1974 being shattered like a glass in a Memorex commercial.
We don't yet know if the other student (or anyone else) received an illegal disclosure of Emily's course grade in the same manner that the email to Em disclosed her fellow student's info to her. We do know (and have so advised the child) that this violation will not in any way result in forcing the professor to change her grade. Even so, if it just educates the educator about how to cut-and-paste contents of emails, especially since this is allegedly an Institute of Freaking Technology, bringing it to their attention will be time and effort well spent.
I got to Olean right on time for a 10:30 hearing, after an 8:30 a.m.stop in Elmira, which I'd tried to make late yesterday, to check on a case somebody asked me to take over. A quick review of clerk files revealed that the other side not only owns property down there, but has leased out the oil and gas rights from that property to various mega energy corporations.
♫Now this here's a story of a guy that Ray
Went down to look if he might be forced to pay
The previous lawyer mighta run into some fail,
But down in the ground is a frackin'-type shale....♫
(Marcellus shale, that is. Natural kind. Passin' gas.)
----
My client's case was second on the 10:30 Olean calendar (and took all of about 10 seconds), but when I arrived, my eye got caught by another familiar name a little further down on the calendar: I saw my own name- and not in the attorney column. My last name, anyway, which is relatively unusual, at least spelled the proper 17th century British way wot it ought to be.
I could tell from the notation that the gentleman was about to have his just-filed, self-filed bankruptcy dismissed because he didn't properly transmit his full nine-digit social security number to the court as required. When attorneys file cases, this magic number gets captured by software, encoded into a special clerk-only file, and transmitted through the electronic filing process; but when pro se debtors file cases, usually in paper format, they have to submit a goofy paper form that is absolutely mandatory and yet very easy to slip up on. That generated the short-notice Notice to this guy, telling him that his case was going to be dismissed if he didn't duly disclose All The
An hour or so after the scheduled hearing of the motion in his case (and the original one in my client's case), I returned for an additional brief appearance in my client's case, and saw Dave, identifiable from the papers on his lap, sitting in the row in front of me. He shouldn't have still been there- his case would've been called minutes after I'd left- but there he was, and when the judge told the assembly that he'd finished all the Chapter 7 motions unless someone thought they hadn't been called, Dave didn't say anything. But I did- to him.
Are you here on the dismissal motion? Because if you are, you should get up and say something.
Sure enough, he was too timid, or overwhelmed, or something, but that moment of distant-relative connectedness I shared with him got him to speak up, and his full SSN handed in properly, to enable him to live another day in This System Of Ours. I told him why it had caught my eye, and that I'd wanted to help, despite us not being related. "Oh, I'm sure we are, ages ago," he replied, and I have to agree. In the world we share, where being kind and helping the needier are good things, I found myself perfectly relating, if not related to.
----
Having saved somebody else's bacon connected to our last names, I then got to spend part of my afternoon having my first name slandered.
After driving through still more nasty storms, claiming two days of mail and heading home, my cell rang with a BLOCKED call. Followed, before I could even answer it, by two more. Intrigued and a little annoyed, I finally answered it, and we had this exchange:
Phone: Is this Rayyyyy?
Me: Yes, can I help you?
Phone: Do you go to Coffee Culture?
(Note to file: that would be a reference to a local-at-least baristalike chain which I have been to, maybe twice, at their location two doors down from Eleanor's stomping grounds at Farmers & Artisans. I've been by, but never in, their additional venues in Tonawanda and, within a coupla hours just today, down in Ellicottville on my way back from Olean.)
Me: Sometimes, but.... who IS this?
Phone: This is Suzanne.
(Note to file, supplemental: more than five hours of brain-racking later, I can't remember ANYONE I've known named Suzanne since the one by that name who took pictures for my high school yearbook, close to 35 years ago. This voice sounded barely half that age range.)
Phone, before any further witty repartee from me: Click.
Moments later, after reporting this exchange to Eleanor, another blocked call came in:
Me: Who are you trying to reach?
Phone: Ray (my last name)
Me: Well, that's me, but I don't know any Suzanne from this century. Why are you calling?
Phone: This is your wife's assistant. Do you like to go to Tim Hortons, or Coffee Culture, or Dunkin Donuts?
Round now, I hear the guy in the background, giggling. Two and two begin to add, and I realize that either (a) I left a message somewhere for one of their parents, or (b) they misdialed my cell number (thus revealing my name to them) and they decided to have fun with me. It's been quiet since that second call, but I am now prepared to scare the living crap out of them with threats of phone company traps and calls to their parents- along with a blunt acknowledgement that I've been making prank calls myself for probably longer than their parents have been alive, and thus know not only how to make them but how to stop them.
Until that call, though, I'm enjoying the sound of crickets in the evening.
----
Then there's Emily's oddity; her grades from third quarter have trickled in, and have been genuinely good, with one unexpected exception. It was different enough from her expectation for her to email the professor in question last week to inquire about why. Earlier today, said professor replied with a semi-lame justification of the grading policies in question. These were fine; academic freedom and all that. What wasn't so fine, though, was that the prof also included, in the body of the email to Em, the full text of an email exchange with ANOTHER student, revealing the latter's grade, and the prof's justification of it, to both the other student and to Emily.
That sound you just heard was the Privacy Act of 1974 being shattered like a glass in a Memorex commercial.
We don't yet know if the other student (or anyone else) received an illegal disclosure of Emily's course grade in the same manner that the email to Em disclosed her fellow student's info to her. We do know (and have so advised the child) that this violation will not in any way result in forcing the professor to change her grade. Even so, if it just educates the educator about how to cut-and-paste contents of emails, especially since this is allegedly an Institute of Freaking Technology, bringing it to their attention will be time and effort well spent.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 02:49 am (UTC)re) the pranksters: You should really ask the if they have Prince Albert in a can.
re) Emily's professor: WHAT?! That is so very many kinds of fail.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 04:01 pm (UTC)As for the grade business, good grief!! You'd think a professor would have some notion of how these things work. :(
no subject
Date: 2011-05-29 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 12:20 am (UTC)Sadly, I ran into many professors like that, one of which ruined one of the best semesters I was ever having, and causing me to leave her classroom, breaking the door, I opened it so hard. Not behavior I am proud of, but... long story short, I was not the first complainer and she is no longer employed there.
Good luck to her.