My Day in (Small Claims) Court

I got to spend this afternoon in small claims court.  I'll cut to the chase and say my case was dismissed, but the plaintiff has the option to re-file so I'm not stupid enough to blog about details with such a litigious fellow at large.  Most of you already know the story anyway.

But, here's the thing, the reason the case was dismissed is that the plaintiff didn't show up, so I was supposed to go at the front of the line for a cursory appearance.  But something got screwed up, so I ended up sitting through every single other case for the afternoon.


I think this is my court karma because the last time I was in court (parking ticket in Providence) I also went last.  But that time it was because the judge hated me for appealing a ticket he thought I had no grounds for appeal on. I knew I was in trouble because I could tell he had let the tickets he was planning to waive go first and mine came after both the woman who argued she saw the No Parking sign but her landlord told her to ignore it and the one who admitted she parked illegally but was fighting on the grounds that the car next to her did not also get a ticket.

The upside to sitting in court all afternoon is the entertainment value of the other cases.  In Providence, at one point they brought in all the folks who had been stuck sitting in the drunk tank overnight.  That was pretty standard except the one lady who was there for violating a restraining order and opened with "What am I supposed to do? Every time I have sex with my boyfriend, I get hauled off to jail."  As it turns out she had cheated on her ex with another man in the same apartment building, something happened that caused the ex to file a restraining order and her new beau's apartment is within the X number of yards so he calls the police every time she comes over.  And this was the third time.

Nothing quite as exciting in small claims this afternoon.  Though, of course, of all the cases, only the two actresses with a roommate rent dispute had to actually be spoken to by the clerk for talking out of turn like it was Judge Judy or something.  The most amusing case, however, was a renter-landlord dispute that was the living embodiment of Chris D'Elia's bit about how bad a gangsta would be as a lawyer because when they try to talk "professional" they just use too many words.  The dispute was actually over whether she was owed an overpayment of rent because she was paying for a private bathroom but lived in a shared bathroom unit.  However, when she started in, it was a loooong five minutes about the living conditions including "And there are people smoking pot in the hallway and me, myself and I don't do drugs and I do not wish for drugs to be a part of my body either through the atmosphere or from accidental inhalation."  It was all I could do not to bust out laughing or yell "Tangerine, popcorn, pow pow pow pow!"