Fucks of Clusters

[captainsblog]

Or would it be "Clusters of Fucks?" Doesn't matter. Yesterday is Put in The Books, for better or worse. Seemed worse at the time, but ultimately all was okay and I got done what needed getting.

One good one all along was finally getting my hair cut at the new home of my longtime Supercuts stylist-



Yeah, her. If you're local, you should go.  I'd been going to them, and almost exclusively her, for going on 20-odd years; I've written about my Hair, There and Everywhere history- which has gone from baby barbering to kitchen-table specials to a dude named Sal and, finally, just this chain where I got good (for what you can do with me) results for not too much scratch.  Dani was nice enough to track me down and let me know she'd moved on, because otherwise I just would've not seen her name in the app and gone, huh?

I checked it out before the appointment so I wouldn't get lost and just to get some sense of the frufru. I didn't, and there wasn't much. That plaza is next to our closest library and not the home of True Stepford somewhat to the north. Eleanor's longtime Great Clips stylist wound up at one of those, and you could practically smell the Benjamins in the ladies' purses as their mani's and pedi's and perms were done. And Eleanor warned me: it's going to cost more than Supercuts. I always tipped generously, so I wasn't worried- at least not about that.

What would A Guy feel, walking into a Salon for the first time in decades, or ever depending on your definition? Would the Mean Girls in the other chairs not let me sit with them? * Should I have been tested for potentially life-threatening potpourri allergies? **

But no worries there.  Dani was Dani. Same equipment, same trim settings, no hot towel at the end but I never wanted that anyway, and then, out came the little Toast cardreader for the payment transaction. This was, as bumbling French detectives say, a cleu.

Me, sotto voce: "Um, are you working for this place or renting a chair?"

Her: similarly: "A chair."

Ah.  And then the grrl made my day:

Her: "Are you over 60? Because I give a discount."

Almost 64-year-old me: "That may be the nicest compliment I've gotten all week!"

She showed me the screen. It was less than what she was charging at the chain place. I made up the difference and then some. She handed me a couple of those cards and offered discounts to refer people. I took more and told her I'd recommend her discount or no discount: I don't need to be bribed to recommend something. In fact, in my line of work they rather discourage it.

That brought a happy turn to what had, before then, been a less than hap-hap-happy day. And other than confirming that I may, indeed, be losing my mind ***, everything after that was pretty good, too.

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I picked yesterday for this follicular detour because it was supposed to be pretty light at work. One client coming in with two documents at noon, the other to sign some routine will papers at 12:30. I only needed to wait for the first and prepare docs for the second, which take about half an hour. Plenty of time getting in close to my usual 9....

until the Universe intervened at 10:06.

My two main practice areas are bankruptcy and litigation. I file and respond to both kinds for different clients. For the most part, a bankruptcy case is a 5K of activity: you train (prepare the documents), start at the opening gun (file them), run along a bit to the first checkpoint (court hearing), run some more (followup on the hearing, file some more stuff), and cross the finish line with the client being discharged. 

Litigation, whether bringing or defending a case, is more like a tennis match. Or pickleball, I suppose, if you're one of the cool kids.  The case goes back and forth. The plaintiff  "serves" the initial document, which is usually, but not always, a two-part filing: a summons (the magic paper that invokes the court's jurisdiction and says "get your ass in here and defend yourself") and a complaint (a more detailed document, originally styled in civil procedure as a "short, plain statement" but made somewhat more complex by subsequent statute and court requirements) which tells the guy on the other side of the net what they're defending. If, but only if, that's what is served, the volley begins with the defendant answering that complaint with, wait for it, an "answer." You admit, you deny, you shrug, you raise anywhere from 1 to 37 (I think that's some idiot's record with me) "affirmative defenses," add a counter or cross claim if you're feeling frisky, and off it goes.  The volley then continues with "discovery," which we will get to. 

This is key, though: you only Answer if you've got a complaint TO answer.  New York, at least, offers an option of only starting a lawsuit with something called a "summons with notice." The summons part's the same ("get your ass in here"), but the "short, plain statement" is really short, giving defendants the bare minimum idea of why you're hauling them into court.  Sometimes it's mandatory, particularly in matrimonial actions: this is the document handed to the jilted spouse, and the Lej didn't want them, or the kids, falling over fainting with detailed allegations of the adultery, the beatings, or nowadays the irreconcilable differences.  But you always CAN start with just that, and if the plaintiff DOES start with that, since you don't have a complaint to answer, you don't. You serve and file a "notice of appearance and demand for complaint." Then the volleying begins- unless it was 10:06 yesterday morning.

Routine debt collection case. Routine, other than it being brought by the State of New York for unpaid tuition for a guy. They did not serve it with a complaint so I only filed the appearance and demand for one. Months went by. Then, a day earlier, the State applied to the county clerk for a default judgment. Since this makes my malpractice sense all tingly, I double checked to make sure I hadn't missed the complaint being filed. Nope. I also checked (because this had happened once) whether the document captioned a "summons with notice" in the first place was actually a summons and complaint. Nope to that, too. They were, as Fonzie simply can't say,....
 

Watch on YouTube

(It's so weird to see him so young and cool after Barry....)

I promptly told them so: emailing the assistant AG on the file demanding its withdrawal, and just to cover the bases, filing a HARUMPH! about it in the court file before they'd actually enter judgment on it. Unfortunately, HARUMPH! is not a filable event; "Objection in Point of Law" was the closest category I could find, so I stuck it under that. I figured that would be the end of it; I'd had a clerk's default of my own wrongly delayed early last week and I didn't even HARUMPH! about it. Yet there, at 10:06, was the silly clerk wrongly entering judgment against my client.

Now's the time to do something horrible: call the clerk's office.  It is run by "Tricky Mickey," a political hack who is nominally a Democrat but got the job with Conservative Party support, and his agenda is getting re-elected and cleared for higher office. Rules, schmules, when it comes to my harumphing. (The County Comptroller has just called him out on the "rules, schmules" part.)  I called the number that goes direct to Mickey's Minion in charge of reviewing judgments. You used to do this in person, genuflecting before them at their desk while they calculated and slide-ruled and, if you were lucky, watched the magic stamp of approval go on it. No more: now if there's a problem, you call their number; but you get Tricky Mickey on voicemail telling you how many wonderful magical services he offers. Pressing 7 gets you judgments, or, rather, more Mickey On Tape. I finally bailed by pressing a bunch of zeroes and got a human being.  This is going to have to go to the Legal Deputy, they said. Oh: I guess that's better than it going to the ILLEGAL one.  More voicemail, but I left the file number and a harumph summary and ask for a callback.

Which I get, and of course miss just as I'm going into my run of appointments. It's the L.D., telling me it came off as quickly as it went on. All that shows on the docket of the case is "DELETED."

Not "expletive deleted." That was another guy known as Tricky.

Onward.

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Another way things are different from the Before Times: the bankruptcy hearing at that first checkpoint of the 5K.  We used to meet the client, either at the hearing location or my office, and in the latter case we'd go to the hearing together. We'd clear security, wait for the case to be called, and then hand up the two vital identifying documents: a government photo ID, usually but not always their drivers license, and an original document with the client's full social security number. The latter was the only time The System could verify the person was who they say they are in terms of SSN. The attorney would ask for, and was supposed to verify, that full nine-digit number, and it would be electronically transmitted into the client's court file, but nowhere in the actual viewable court file did that full number actually appear, only the last 4 digits.  The hearing date was the only check against identity theft (intentionally pretending to be the person filing) or identity stupidity (usually transposing a digit in there).  If you got one wrong, lots of things would have to be filed to fix it.

And then came COVID. No in-person checks anymore. No in-person anything anymore. So the System designed a system. We now get those original ID documents BEFORE the hearing; I usually ask for them at the first appointment, or the signing appointment at the latest.  They are then transmitted, not to the court file, but to the case trustee's Super Secret Secured Socket Rocket Docket only they can see, and the attorney then files a sworn statement Yes, I saw these, they're the originals and I didn't make them up.

That didn't happen with this client, because he was a repeat filer. His case was dismissed in May and had to be refiled. I had other things to pre-file before the hearing and noticed, oh yeah, his IDs must be in the older file. Except, number 1, it was from 2016 and I haven't found his file from back then yet; and number 2 (known for other shitty things), even if I did have that file under my nose, duh, it was pre-COVID and I wouldn't have sent them in before the hearing. No problem, though: client would stop in yesterday with both his license and the full-number proving document.

That often is, but doesn't have to be, the client's Social Security card. Amazingly, we both still have ours from the 1970s, and I'm amazed by how many old fogies still do. The main alternative go-to is a client's W-2. (There's that shitty Number Two again.) The variety of 1099 documents from businesses, banks and retirement accounts may also work. You can also walk into your handy dandy local Social Security office, and after proving to them who you are, they will give you a print out of what the full number is. It is rare, however, for these officers to be in the same building as the court hearing anymore, and until recently in Buffalo, it was miles away.

 

But there he was, right on time, bearing his current license and his most recent W-2 form. The one with only the last four digits on it:P  This is what asshole thieves are doing to make my job harder. Increasingly, getting access to an original document with that full nine-digit number is about as easy as breaking into Fort Knox. So he’s going to have to come back with his card before his hearing next week, and I keeps one thing on my plate I was really hoping would have been off it.

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That rolled me right into the next appointment for the execution of a simple set of will documents. Until a few days before, I had only communicated by email with the client, who I somehow got in my head was of the male variety. So when a She showed up a few days ago, without an appointment but with a very thick accent, I had no idea who she was. She turned out to be the misidentified He, and her answers to the questions I needed to prepare her documents with? They never got to me because she emailed them right before the four day battle between Spectrum and Microsoft that ate a bunch of my incoming emails. But no matter: she filled out another one on the spot and I set the appointment for 12:30 yesterday to come in and sign them.

It was a tight window, because they were doing closings in our conference room starting at 1, and by 12:45, she still wasn’t there.  She did eventually roll in, without enough time to sign everything before other people needed the room, but that's okay: she had changes anyway. Quite a few of them, in fact. She comes from one of the university-sponsored legal plans that I service, and I found the professor types coming from those to be the very pointy-headed academics everybody makes fun of.

I told her to have a seat back out front while I made the changes. The first closing wasn't done when I was, so I asked a coworker to come out and witness the signing with me in the waiting room.  Ah, but I think I take these home and be sure this is what I want.

Fine. I'm done with you, at least for today. My work is done, I'm billing your plan, and when you're good and ready, if you ever are, you can come back and we'll get it done. At least I don't need to know her full Social. At least not yet.

----

THAT left just enough time to continue a volley in another piece of litigation.

Months ago, other side served- this time, the right papers. Client, who may also be an academic type, started by defending it himself, but then discovered he was covered and I got the case. I volleyed back an answer, the other side served up a moderate list of discovery demands, which I mostly prepared an answer to. But then we got talking about settling the case, or at least my client and I did. The other lawyer has been mostly unresponsive for the past several months, but we did agree I could hold off on formally "volleying" back with my discovery response while we tried to work things out. 

Unfortunately, there was early involvement by a judge- caused mainly by my client, in his early representing himself days, going to court to ask for time to get a lawyer instead of just asking the other lawyer for that time. That resulted in a "scheduling order" that the other lawyer is now way behind complying with. I've offered him extensions numerous times, but they have to be in writing and the judge has to agree to them- and the longer it goes, the less likely it is he will.

So I prepared another kind of  "volley" to the other side, which is more like lobbing a hand grenade. It's called a Demand To Resume Prosecution. It's a nasty thing to get, and one I've only sent maybe a half dozen times in 30-plus years. If you don't comply, your case can be dismissed. But first, I needed to be in compliance myself, so on Thursday, I dusted off my responses, sent them to the client and he sent me some witness names to include. I added them, made it all pretty and copied him what I would be sending with my Demand to Resume Prosecution.

Close to 11:00 Thursday night, a call comes in from client: NONONO, I have changes!

Really? It was one name. Somewhere between the 10:06 disaster and the fun at noon, I added it, rejiggered the whole thing, and.... it's still sitting there. It'll go out Monday. I had a hair appointment, and a workout mixed with testing my cognitive functions, and today and tomorrow is music, and so and so and so and so and so.

And that's it for today. Except for the footnotes.

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* I mention Mean Girls on account of seeing an ad the other day for a local performance:



The key in that is it's the "high school version." That sounds like the sanitized "Broadway Junior" stable of musicals that are made available for the teen set. Perhaps most famed among them was the Bowdlerized staging of  Avenue Q Junior, in which "Internet is For Porn" was replaced with "Social Life is Online" and the songs "My Girl Friend Who Lives In Canada" and "Loud As The Hell You Want" were cut from their version.  I figure in the high school version of this one, the "mean girls" are only slightly peeved, and they even let the fat nerdy kids sit with them. Just not too close.  I also thought how Moms for Liberty (aka Klanned Karenhood) would feel, but they’re probably fine with bullying the marginal.

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** No worries, there, either. Besides, I've been in Bed Bath and Beyond going out of business sales, so I may have acquired potpourri immunity.
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** I picked the Dead Mall location from recent reports to do my first workout in a week, with amazingly my 16th straight different trainer (they're evaluating him for full coachiness), and got there to see if I had, in fact, seen my client's storefront there. I am not surprised to say it was not there. That does not mean I did not see it, because dead malls tend to have fly-by-night clients and, this being a new month, July 1st would've been the time to fly.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that was fascinating!