Fair's Fair....

[captainsblog]

I only had two days in court this past week- one each in Rochester and Buffalo with bankruptcy clients who were the first to receive my new and improved third-grade-level Activity Sheet to help them understand the teeny leetle things they had to do to get out of thousands of dollars in debt:

-Show up on time.  Depending on the time, place and circumstances, I tell them to either meet me in my office an hour before the hearing in downtown Whatever, or at the hearing location 30 minutes before. My letters always told them this; the Activity Sheet now puts it right on the top. Tuesday's was 30 minutes before in the hearing room; Friday's, an hour before at my office here.

Did either of these work?
 

"QI KLAXON wrong answer sound effect FULL VERSION" (Watch on YouTube)

 

Of course not. The client for Tuesday's 10:30 hearing was still parking the car at 10:20, and was only saved from embarrassment and an extra hour's wait because the prior hearings had fallen further behind then even she was. Friday's, where we needed every minute to prepare for a potential shitshow, the preparation didn't get started until the client rolled in to my office less than 30 minutes before we had to be in the room, 20 minutes away.

-Bring what I tell you. Ah, but the biggest item on the Activity Sheet was devoted to getting people to bring proof of their full Social Security Number with them.  This is now absolutely mandatory because of a small amount of identity fraudsters giving out the wrong number, but a bigger (but still fairly small) amount of people who simply gave their attorney a number that was one digit off.  As you can imagine, this does bad things to the credit of the unfortunate soul whose number was used, and the offending party has to go through a bunch of curative steps to fix those problems.

They have several options for bringing proof of their full Social, but it's gotta be one of them, and fishing around for it when you're in the hearing room is NOT one of them. But that's what they both did- fortunately, I had suitable ways of overcoming with each, but cmon, people.



Just as fortunately, we got out of the first with no further delays or consequences; and while the shitshow did not occur as expected in the other, there was some unexpected shit on display, which I think I managed to get all nice and clean- or at least will once the client manages to show up at my office with a nominal filing fee so I can do my.... One Job.

Sometimes I wonder if "Job" should be pronounced more often with a long "O" sound.

----

In between those, I just caught up on a lot of sit-down paperwork projects that are hard to get into with a court date looming.  I also picked up a new client- the Erie County Agricultural Society, better known in these parts as "The Fair."  They had an issue with a possible bankruptcy involving one of their traveling vendors, and I talked them through it reasonably quickly.  In the end, it hardly seemed worth sending a bill for barely an hour of my time, so I've been thinking about proposing that they just send some passes to the event to call it even that I could share with friends or co-workers.

"The event," in these parts, remains a surprisingly Big Thing.  I have vague memories of attending a county fair somewhere near Binghamton when I was a kid, but that's about it.  Long Island didn't have enough farmland left to support any kind of agricultural shows; there was a Tompkins County Fair up in Trumansburg, but Ithaca's too close to the season-ending State Af-Fair up in Syracuse for it to ever get much traction-pulls.   Monroe County has a sizeable Fairgrounds, even with a permanent indoor arena, but when we lived there it seemed a tacky minor-league thing; they've moved what's left of it to more rural parts of the county, a far cry from the 70s when school bus demolition derbies and even strippers were part of the Midway.

Somehow, though, Erie County's has always maintained its cachet.  Having a large, permanent site with year-round structures and attractions has helped (a harness track, now casino gambling).  It's also taken on an emotional connection, with this early-to-mid-August event being considered by many to be Buffalo's "end of the summer" marker.  For a few years after we moved back here, the promoters got a little too big for their bigtops and started promoting it beyond the immediate region as "America's Fair." That didn't last long, and they've returned to their roots (if not their rutabagas) and are back to the Ferris wheel and funnel cakes and all the memories they inspire.

Somehow, in my on-and-off almost 40 years here, I've never been.  If we work it out with comps, this will be a first.  I wouldn't say it's Bucket List; more one of those "let's do this so I'll never be tempted to do it again" kind of things.

Besides, there are other options.  There's a Bark in the Park baseball game closer to home in Batavia on Tuesday night, and while our Rochester friends will likely miss it, Pepper and I may give it a shot.  We're also closing in on t-minus two weeks to the Big League Event with the Mets; they have continued their completely amazin' turnaround, beating up on a series of lesser opponents through last week before, the past two nights, coming from behind against the arguably better team in front of them in the standings with two straight walk-off wins where they trailed going into the bottom of the ninth.  Until Friday night, they hadn't won a single game from behind in their final at-bat; now they've done it two nights in a row.  And I missed both of them; we were watching our newest Netflix binge, a Danish tv show called Rita, for most of both evenings, and I turned in before either of the comebacks.  But then, this team has always generally done better when I'm not actually paying attention;)

Comments

[thanatos_kalos]

I worked the Fair occasionally when I was with Rural/Metro. It was...an interesting experience, let's say. :P The food is very good, though.

[captainsblog]

Yeah, my biggest fear is I'd wind up acting out on the first MAGA hat-wearing yahoo I ran into.

[thanatos_kalos]

::g:: Well, there'd be a number of first aid stations where you can get cleaned up if you do. ;)

[warriorsavant]

Yes, it never fails to amaze me that people can't follow simple instructions. I should expect it by now, but still, deep in my soul, don't comprehend that a goodly number of people have the ability to follow through slightly below that of a rock.

[captainsblog]

There's a Thing about this particular court that drives me nuts. The clerks are bored to tears because filings are down, and, fearful of not looking busy, they issue a "deficiency notice" on any filing that is not 110 percent perfect. They then mail these to the clients. The same clients who ignore what I send them 30-50 percent of the time. THESE, they have close to a 100 percent response rate on.

I should probably just start labeling all my letters to them DEFICIENCY NOTICE and see how it goes.

[warriorsavant]

Or label them, “You may have already won 1 million dollars"