TTSOML #81: My Process Server

The neighbor who said he'd serve parties with my legal papers was ready, bright and early. He sat in the backseat because I had so much stuff in the passenger side. I apologized and was going to move it but he said it was okay. I figured he was safer in the backseat anyway.

We went to McDonalds and got breakfast and coffee. I paid, and had told him I didn't have very much money but that I'd pay for all his meals and however much coffee he wanted. He was okay with this. So it was an adventure.

The best thing, is that no one expected this guy to be serving legal papers. He looked a little bit like someone who had been homeless at some point in his life. Besides which, he spilled half a cup of coffee on his white painter pants while in the car. "Oh no!" he said, "I NEVER should have worn these pants". I looked back, and there was a huge coffee stain on his thigh and I couldn't help laughing. People were driving by us and he would wave to them, and we got the funniest looks. Like, what was a guy that looked like THAT doing in...the backseat (?!) of my car?

I will fill in more of the fun details at some other time, but for the sake of getting these TTSOMLs out of the way, suffice it to say, against all odds, we successfully served every single party. And I had named them all.

After awhile, one party was calling the other party and warning them about my guy, so people refused to see him and made him wait. The few parties who refused to see him (including Mt. Angel Abbey officials) I later got when another friend I'd known for over 10 years (formerly Catholic) served them himself. He mainly did it for the defamation case, because he knew how wrong the article was about me.

All my friends knew the WW was totally off. They supported me in filing a lawsuit, but what they couldn't understand, is how it could get dismissed. They thought that if a judge had dismissed it, perhaps I actually HAD done some of the things named in the article. This wasn't the case. That lawsuit was dismissed after I got too sick to keep litigating. I was extremely ill with repeated bouts of bronchitis (which I couldn't hide--I had phglem and cough) for over 6 months. I asked the judge for a medical abatement and she refused to give me one. The judge had total control over the case and I found out the Abbey attorneys had basically tried to select her. She knew John Kaempf, one of their lawyers, and she did more than one favor for him and the Abbey. I was set up to lose. No matter what my claims were, and how wrong and "in trouble" the paper was, I never had a chance of winning. It was me against the system and a lot of power. My friends didn't get it and I lost almost all of my friends after I lost that case. Mainly because if I couldn't fix it, that article was associated to my name, and they no longer wanted to be associated with me, for their own social and career reasons.