Lots of Unexpected....
Apr. 27th, 2019 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogLet's start this recap of the past week with Monday, Monday. Can't trust that day.
Got a shit night sleep Sunday night into Monday- thanks to a cat, the Not Evil Cat for once- who kept getting up, scratch-scratch-scratching to get out, and then minutes later scratch-scratch-scratching to get back in. I didn't mind terribly, because I thought I didn't have any morning appointments and could turn my alarm off. Then I checked my all-knowing, all-seeing phone. Nope. Two conflicting appointments in downtown Buffalo between 9 and 10. At least they were in the same building, so I juggled them successfully. One went quickly and amicably. The other was using a new-to-me procedure for herding cats landlords, one of whom I was helping on the Friends And Family Plan. It wound up being an utter waste of both of our times, since it only achieved a result which the tenants had already self-inflicted.
This got me back home in time to make sure Eleanor got to work on time. We had to switch cars because hers was due for its Repair of Stupidity on the collision shop's Night Shift plan. (It reminded me that Night Shift is a rather spooky Michael Keaton movie I've got to lay hands on;) I brought the car to them after finishing with the soon-to-be-catalogued clients Monday afternoon, with the promise of them returning Alanis to us during the day today. Which they did. I brought it to them around five last night, walked home, and then reclaimed it right before Eleanor went to work today. No further incidents or accidents with the new car in my tooling about the remainder of today.
Ah, but the unexpected stories from the week.
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Client One- another of the Friends and Family variety. Bought a vehicle last fall, immediately regretted it. I filed papers to undo the deal. Various hiccups ensued. Eventually, seller lawyered up and essentially proved that the allegations against seller were not provable. We regrouped to "get what you can get" mode, where they were given money to bring their loan on it current, along with a promise to fix all the "weren't right" things about it.
We endured further hiccups about the delivery of the checks (one of which contributed to my booboo with Eleanor's new car two weekends ago), but all was where it needed to be by the middle of last week, and I got confirmation that the vehicle had been "released." Unspecified was where it was at the time of the release. Turns out that while we were negotiating the resolution with seller, the vehicle was indeed "released"- to a car lot in Virginia, where it had since remained, free for my client to pick it up. Client One was not happy about the long drive. Ultimately, I found a method where someone who would be in Virginia this weekend could bring the vehicle back here, but Client One was not interested. They instead wound up doing exactly what I would have done- taking a drive to Virginia and driving it home. There are still issues, but I feel no guilt or shame about any of them.
I have even less guilt or shame about Client Two. HE came to me around two years ago to do a BK for him and Mrs. Client Two. Eventually, Mrs. C2 dropped out of the filing, because of a rental property she owned in another state. Mr. C2 didn't want it getting ensnared in the case in any way. Mister C2's just-him case got confirmed, payments are on schedule, but then this past Monday came a callin'. Mrs. C2 is trying to refinance that house, and MISTER C2's bankruptcy is causing a title objection....
as it will, seeing how the Missus deeded half the property to the Mister 11 years ago.
He lost a lot of sleep over this that night, Me, not so much. He has a bunch of good points in his favor that make it largely a no-harm-no-foul situation, but I can't promise with 100 percent certainty that we can clear the bankruptcy objection, or avoid worse consequences from his name indisputably being on a deed from a decade past.
It's not an uncommon occurrence. Elder law lawyers often put kids on the deeds to their parents' homes without giving a moment's thought to the implications if any of those kids wind up in bankruptcy, which they do, in this venue, at least 10-20 times a year not knowing that Mom and Dad did this. The kinder of bankruptcy trustees ask about this early in cases, to minimize the unintended consequences of such "estate planning." The nastier ones lie in wait and collect four-to-five-figure commissions on the kids' shares of their parents' homes because Mom and/or Dad "didn't know." I suspect, but do not promise, that Client 2's trustee is one from the first group. We shall see.
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Other things are more expected: as I riffed on an old Chinese proverb the other day-
Give a lawyer a deadline, and she (or more likely, he) will run around like a crazy person on the last day of the deadline day to get the project done.
Give him two at once with simultaneous deadlines and his head, and possibly other parts, will explode.
(One of my best friends promptly asked, in response to that, "Which parts?" To which I replied, Parts is Parts.)
So Client 3 had a deadline. For months. Ignored it. Went ghost on me for weeks. Finally, in February, Opponent whined to the judge, who agreed to give me until April 15th to respond, because that shoulda been plenty of time. April 11th comes; they roll in with "the documents." Which is to say, the six-page printout I gave them months ago, almost all of them marked "You have this."
Well, we do. In about 30 paper and another hundred electronic files. And hearing this, I asked the office people how long they needed to transmogrify these various things. They said until April 25th. I got an extension until then, but only then. Yet despite my losing sleep over this each ensuing night, of course it didn’t become time sensitive until the day before the deadline. I didn’t get out of there- with the full copy paper box of shit - until 3:30 in the afternoon of the deadline, and got it delivered to Opponent, with a resounding thud of the box on a side chair, just in time to boogie out of there to get back to Buffalo for Night Court.
Night Court wasn't even the Other deadline killing my brain that day. That was for Client 4, but that actually went reasonably smoothly. Information sent and received and reviewed and revised in time to meet an electronic deadline which was also on Thursday. I even fit in picking up time-sensitive documents for the next day from Client 5 and got them to where THEY needed to be yesterday.
Still, all of this contributed to some major verplemptness that spilled into the weekend.
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It wasn't until last night that I realized my debit card was missing. I'd last used it at an ATM Thursday morning before all the Give A Lawyer A Deadlining had kicked in, and not again until trying to buy grape late Friday after seeing Avengers: Endgame (an upcoming post of its own). Went back to said ATM today and discovered that said bank branch is closed until Monday. I put an alert on my phone for any suspicious activity on our account, and we've been fine juggling with Eleanor's debit card in the meantime, but this I did not need.
I also had distractions over the past few days connected to the Sabres' minor league hockey team (sucking about as much as they do), the asshole who is ruining Jeopardy!, and players being selected/not selected in the NFL draft. But by today, most of that was past. The dog park has reopened, and Pepper and I returned there for the first time in weeks this morning. Two more of Eleanor's drawings came home framed and are now hanging in the dining room; and I picked up some cool new music, ordered more to arrive Monday, and discovered new and final albums from several other old friends. One such is the final album from the Irish group known as the Cranberries; they lost their lead singer Dolores O'Riordan early last year, and the remaining members decided to finish the album they were working on when she died, titled (probably in retrospect) In the End.
Just be careful pronouncing her name when texting your wife and using Siri's voice recognition function:
She found it funny. Which, after all these years, is what I would have expected;)