The Crazy Things We do to Get Your Legal Documents Served Properly
By: Kim Letus
I think we process servers as a group should get together and write a book about our experiences on the road. Who knows, people might actually be willing to pay for this stuff. Maybe we could use the proceeds toward our fund raising efforts to keep us all in business (just kidding). Although I’m in the office and very rarely on the road any longer, my husband, Bob, and the other process servers in our office always have stories to tell.
Just a few of the highlights of Bob’s process serving career:
- He was physically bounced off a porch (deliberately) by a very overweight man to whom he had just served papers. The man’s weapon? His enormous stomach.
- He was sprayed down by a hose.
- A woman he was trying to serve took off on her riding lawnmower, and he had to chase her on foot through a field in order to serve her.
- A woman answered the door completely naked and handed him a bag of trash.
- An elderly lady he had just served asked him to drive she and her friends to Bingo because they had no ride (he did).
- And on a more serious note, the door he was knocking on opened a crack and the barrel of a shotgun came out and was put against his forehead. Most unbelievable was that he proceeded to calmly ask if the person he was looking for was home.
Another process server who worked for us at one time, Sam, looked and spoke like he had walked straight off the set of the Sopranos. A woman for whom he had papers happened to be behind on her car payments. When she answered the door, she handed him her car keys and nervously asked him if it would be alright if she cleaned out her glove compartment before he took the car.
It takes a certain type of person to deal with this type of drama every day and keep plugging along at the job. We, as a group, are a strange and diligent breed.
We had a process server once who quit shortly after spending an hour trudging through an apple orchard filled with migrant workers during apple picking season looking for a particular migrant worker who was dodging child support. She was a fairly good process server, and I hated to lose her; but not everyone is willing to do the ridiculous things we face sometimes in order to get the job done and keep the client happy.
And then there’s George, who has worked with us for a number of years and who is, for all intent and purposes, tireless. George has a very authoritative and imposing demeanor and drives a Crown Victoria which resembles an unmarked police vehicle. Because of this, some people jump to the conclusion, before he identifies himself as a process server, that he is a police officer. George recently adopted an abandoned German Shepherd from a shelter. He plans to train the dog and take it along for company when he serves papers. George serves in a number of bad neighborhoods in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie where there is blatant drug and gang activity. We at the office have been entertaining ourselves lately by speculating about what chaos George will create in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie when he pulls up to the curb with his shepherd in the back of his Crown Victoria, wearing his “Cool Hand Luke” sunglasses, and everyone in the neighborhood starts flushing God-knows-what down their toilets!