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captainsblogWhen you begin your week, and month, quoting Frank Zappa, you know it's gonna be good.
I'm at my desk about to begin another call-in to court. Hopefully this one will go better than the one I had last week, where I effectively, if accidentally, dropped the audio equivalent of a Zoombomb on the entire hearing room. On my first experience with this call-in thingy earlier in the month, which went fairly quickly on a short calendar, I realized our office landlines have no mute button. Since the microphone in the hearing room picks up everything, they ask us to mute our phones until our case is called (and not to put the call on hold, which produces worse noise). So for last Thursday's hearing, I brought in my mobile phone with a working mute button, and connected it to an external speaker which would amplify the sound from the hearing room but not our voices on this end. I also put the phone on Do Not Disturb, so I wouldn't get the boop-boop notifications of other incoming calls when we were on the line- which we were, for over an hour waiting for cases ahead of us and through our own case. Didn't matter: at least four calls came in on my phone while I was either on mute or, worse, at the very end of our own hearing when my line was live. When I "hung up," what I actually did was hang up the incoming call; everybody on the court call could hear me and my client for at least three minutes until the trustee emailed me: HANG UP, DUDE!
(Update: Just finished today's phone hearing. I THOUGHT I'd solved this problem; the iPhone has a DND setting that lets you either silence all calls completely, or just when the phone is locked (the default setting). Obviously, it's not "locked" when you're on another call. So I switched it and thought that would keep calls out. Of course it didn't. At least I hung up properly.)
So I took my turn being the Asshole. Don't worry, though; I've got company.
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The first of these stories is old, but I was reminded of it last week when a friend from high school posted on Facebook about an Asshole of His Own. We lost touch after we graduated, but both took separate paths into the same field of law, and he very graciously took over my mother's house closing on Long Island when I was unexpectedly detained by Eleanor giving birth on the scheduled closing date. I've referred some things to him over the years, but this story came back because he has now apparently acquired a troll: a debtor on an account he was collecting decided to post a series of Youtube videos making the lawyer out to be a Very Bad Man. To sympathize with him, I decided to share my own such tale:
Years ago, I obtained a judgment for a law firm I do some work with. Routine efforts produced nothing, and I moved on for the time. Then, in a freak of collections nature, Key Bank sent me a response to somebody else's subpoena- but concerning my debtor. It gave a new address for him- an address I knew to be near the Rochester airport. I googled it and there's my guy, happily behind the controls of the Cessna he was loaning out for a flight school he was partnering in (which had nothing to do with the legal work Brett did for him). I sent subpoenas and restraining notices to his partners in the business, all conveniently named on the school website. In response, I got this email-
I told my friend last week that he finally inspired me to get the thing framed. Only cost five bucks, which is a lot less than the full amount of the judgment he paid me not long after getting that.
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Dealing with unrepresented debtors is one of the scourges of an attorney's existence. There's really no equivalent in, say, dentistry, because patients tend not to come in having tried ripping their own teeth out. (I suspect hairstylists are going to be doing some corrective work in the coming weeks, though.) Late last week, I got to deal with one of these pro se's, as we call them. I already have a $55,000 judgment against him for defrauding a couple, and we're due for trial later this month on an even bigger sum. He keeps coming at me with proposals, all of them smaller than what I already have on record, and I keep reporting them to the clients and conveying their NO! in multiple languages. This time, he got mad at me about the way I was talking to him. Why don't we work this out? Can't you just talk with me like you would if I was a fellow attorney?
You know the zinger you usually don't think of until it's too late? Not this time; I replied, "Sir, if I treated you like a fellow attorney, I would have had to report you to the Grievance Committee. Because the LAST time you called, in the earshot of another attorney in my doorway, you promised that if we didn't take your offer, you would fraudulently convey assets so my clients would never see a dime!"
That shut him up. I didn't even get any calls past my Do Not Disturb.
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Next, some more about contractors, and disturbances. I'll let Eleanor tell the first part of this story as she wrote it down late last night about the events of the previous evening and Sunday afternoon:
Our next door neighbors on one side have been building a deck. A deck which covers about two-thirds of their back yard. All wood, and it would be quite nice, except that they have stripped the yard of most of the shrubs which used to help dampen noise. We can hear everything. I mean everything. They entertain a lot, and they, their friends and relatives, like to sit and talk. A lot.
Pretty soon, between the alcohol, the pot, and the general conviviality, they get LOUD. They have one friend who has a big voice (Ray and I call him Foghorn), and on some evenings, he gets to the point where he's dropping f-bombs constantly. It gets old. Last night, I even heard some racist shit in their conversation, and that was the last straw.
They also have a portable fire pit, the type that's a round pan on legs, with a top made of screening to keep the sparks from flying. They keep it stoked all evening, just for atmosphere, apparently. Their yard is hot, between the absence of trees/shade, and the amount of hard surfaces. Our yard has very large pin oak near our patio, 22 feet away from the back of our garage. It's quite cool, comparatively speaking. Last night, it was humid (83%, as I know from my handy digital high/low thermometer and hygrometer). They had the fire pit about five feet from the fence between us. The smoke rose up in the heat of their yard, rolled over the top of the fence, and sank down into ours.
I was beside myself last night. I determined that we would talk with them today. It was easy to throw a pity party, but today I pulled out some index cards, and started writing. I noted that when they put up the fence, I said I was glad because we like our privacy. The wife then noted, they like theirs. I feel like we have no privacy now, like we're unwillingly in their yard, when we go to the back of ours.
Ray's idea was to invite them back into our yard, to let them see what we had, and get an idea of how their behavior impacts how we feel in our own space.
When opportunity came, we asked them over. They came reluctantly, and within two minutes, the husband said, "I'm sorry (he isn't), if this is about the fence, I spent three thousand dollars, and put in a lot of labor to build it. I don't know what to tell you guys, if you want we'll turn our music down, but [don't give us a hard time] if we have friends and family over! I won't be a part of this conversation!" And he left, saying, "Ridiculous!" as he went.
The wife stayed and although we couldn't get her to sit down with us, she at least listened. I don't think the beauty of our back yard impressed itself on either of them at all. When I tried to get her to understand that a lot of the things they removed were great sound baffles, she said, "I'm sorry, but the way it looked before was awful!" She also said, "Before, you lived next door to an 85-year-old woman who never had any children."
I don't understand the lack of respect for someone like Betty. My heart breaks. She grew every vegetable she ate (and she ate a lot of them). She made her own yogurt. She made her own sauce. Yes, she and Charlie never had biological kids of their own, but they were like foster parents to at least one of their nephews, although I may be shaky on the actual relation. I also find it an unconvincing, shall we say, indictment of Betty, given that the woman making it can be at times, rather cavalier about her own son. I didn't say that, as I'm sure those of you reading this already know. Ray did speak up about the fact that he himself lost the hearing in one ear due to a bike accident when he was nine, and we worry about the fact that her son, who's seven years old, tootles around without a bike helmet.
I tried to paint a picture of last night's ambiance, and how awful it seemed to us (more to me than Ray, because he doesn't hear very well and I do). I went so far as to suggest that she research the restrictions on fire pits. Spoiler alert: they're not allowed nearer than 15 to any structure on the property).
Initially, she said, "It's my back yard, and I'll do with it what I want!" Eventually, she came around, in the course of the discussion, when I asked her to please try to keep their voices down when they're outside, and to limit the objectionable language. She said, "We'll try", and I am hopeful that through her better nature, she will see that they do.
When I saw that, I knew a few points had to be added. So they were. This was my comment to it:
I could add many things to this. I'll go with just these:
- And BTW, Betty, when she was well past 80, DID make an effort to fix that fence. (She also shamed you, and us, and everybody on the block with her own personal diligent snow shoveling until the winter just before she died.) Why didn't she finish ripping it out? Because she got ripped off by a sleazy contractor who took advantage of a widow. I offered to go after the guy at no cost to her. She wouldn't- too embarrassed. I deal with (as in suing them) many contractors who do exactly the same thing. I'm glad you're not one of them.
- As far as what it cost? Again, thank you. I know it must be hard with the pandemic on and business probably down. But I also know that we offered you a number of paid home repair opportunities at our house since you moved here. You turned them down. I've never seen your card, but I suspect it says "No job too big- some too small."
So let's move on. The password is,.... "Kindness."
They were oddly quiet last night, and I saw nothing of them this morning. I don't expect to be invited over for cocktails anytime soon, though.
* This one:
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Finally, not humor as such, but some observations about the COVIDiocy and other lunacy of the past few days:
- Saw this going around this morning-
Eleanor has to put up with this kind of nonsense all the time at work, so I offered this as a comeback:
That's fine, sir. If you're not going to follow the rules, you can just leave through that exit shaped just like your body going out of the side of the mountain.
-Then we had these observations about George Floyd, the latest proof that there's really no such thing as Minnesota Nice, which anyone who watched either the original Fargo or its progeny could have told you. I saw these posted in the early days after that murder of a Person of Color when things began turning badly there (for, you know, people other than George Floyd):
There as in New York, protests over the weekend turned into riots, with substantial damage to places totally undeserving of it. One that was not damaged, but I stupidly reported a rumor about, was Rochester's Great Great House of Guitars. For one thing, its owner is about as far on the circle of belief from The Man as you can get; more practically, the HOG is miles from the downtown Rochester hotspot where the worst of the bad behavior was breaking out. It's actually much closer to the zoo, which also generated false rumors that protesters had let one of the lions out onto Seneca Avenue. That was also false, although it would have been more entertaining:
White supremacist masquerading as an Antifa: Herrrre, kitty kitty kitty!
Lion:
I guess some assholes are tastier than others:)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-01 07:56 pm (UTC)Adored your "don't stand on the X" meme. Sums up life nicely, "every thing I need to know, I learned watching Loonie Tunes."