Livin' la vida Springer!
Jerry Springer has made a lot of money by putting the twisted, crumbling lives of a few on display for the rest of the populace. Whether or not this is noble, or even acceptable is irrelevant; the fact of the matter is that these people are not the oddities of our society, but instead a representative sampling.
Take my family as an example. My older brother, the ElderPutz, once claimed that he lived and worked too far away to come visit my father on a regular basis. Dad was living with me in San Francisco at the time, while Paul was living in Oakland and working in Emeryville. San Francisco, of course, is on the West coast of California, while Oakland and Emeryville are in California, all the way on the other side of the bay. Heck, he would have had to cross a bridge to get to San Francisco.
His latest insanity surrounds a piano that was supposedly the property of my mother. When I moved into a house on Capital, I was given a piano. For six years, I had that piano in my music studio. Later, My mother asked me to give it to wee Cassie, which I thought was a fantastic idea, since I rarely used it.
It was, and still is, in the posession of Cassie and her parents. Now, however, Paul is claiming that Cassie's piano is actually his, and that he wants it.
Paul says he is going to sue me to get the piano (though why he thinks he should sue me, instead of Cassie, is beyond me.) What he doesn't realize is that he would have to prove:
The first wouldn't be too hard, and the second is proven if he can prove the third. It is possible that he could prove Cassie's piano and my mother's are the same, and in fact, that isn't really in dispute. That last one, however, is a biggie.
He says it is his piano, and that he loaned it to John and Gemma. He claims that he has witnesses to that fact, including John and Gemma themselves. I seriously doubt that last bit. If it were true, there would be no issue to resolve.
Unfortunately for Paul, that's about all he has to go on. On the other hand, I have witnesses who know that my mother did in fact give the piano to Cassie. I can also prove that it was in my posession at Capital for about five years prior to being in John and Gemma's hands.
Of course, the coup d'grace on my side is the fact that my Dad is still living, and he was there when Mom gave the thing to Cassie. He probably won't remember it, but I have faith that he would say it should belong to Cassie, the granddaughter he sees all the time, rather than the son who never visits, from all the way across that big, scary bay.
Mind you, I would be adamant about not bringing Dad into the middle of a court battle that would certainly turn nasty. I would seriously lobby that a neutral third party visit him and get a deposition which could then be entered into the court record, rather than hauling him into court to see his children fighting.
The king of bullshit, Paul also claims that he will ask for -- and be awarded, naturally -- legal costs, which would be several thousands of dollars. Now, IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but it seems to me that a dispute about the ownership of a Baldwin Acrosonic piano (worth, at most, a thousand dollars or so) would fall under the jurisdiction of the small claims court, rather than the full-blown civil court.
Again, IANAL, but I seem to recall that small claims court is only for disputes of up to around $5,000. Whether or not you can choose to sue in the regular court system for amounts under $5k is something I couldn't tell you, but somehow, I doubt it.
If it is limited to small claims court, I think you're supposed to represent yourself, so it seems unlikely that a judge would award legal costs to the ElderPutz. Even if it were tried in the regular court, I don't know if he would get legal costs. Perhaps, but I think that's a risk I'm willing to take.
I think Paul could tell that he wouldn't be able to scare me into giving in, so he beseeched me to talk to Rachel about it, hoping that her fears would give him the edge, and she would tell me to just give him the piano. I don't think that's the case -- Rachel is a lot stronger than he thinks.
As I see it, Paul hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of getting anywhere, and he knows it. He just likes to come up with extreme consequences, only tenuously connected to reality and with just a hint of fact, as a way of scaring others into acquiescing to him. Of course, that technique runs in the family, and it simply doesn't work on me.
And if the ElderPutz does follow through on his ridiculous threats, I will be only too happy to respond in kind -- suing him for 10 years of storage fees.