Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dr. Skaff Goes to Court

Well, it's official - I am once again single. Today was the hearing to finalize the divorce. In most cases, the "hearing" is waived and the lawyer schedules a time to just file the paperwork. But apparently, certain judges require that an actual hearing take place to finalize a divorce. However, only one party is required to be present for the hearing making it into, more or less, a formality. Formality it was - and total waste of time. Here is the time-line of events for my morning, then spilling into the rest of the day. Remember yesterday's "Lull" post - today was quite the opposite.

9:35 Show up at courthouse and find where hearing will be taking place.
9:45 My lawyer shows up and takes me through what the hearing will entail - I am informed that the most difficult question that I will have to answer will be "Would you please state your full legal name?".
9:55 My lawyer goes into the completely empty courtroom and into the back to inform the judge that we were there.
9:57 Hearing begins - My lawyer asks the most difficult question - I manage to answer correctly (not so tough), then asks a series of questions pertaining to the document that I had signed three weeks ago - (all of the answers are yes, by the way)
9:59 Judge grants the divorce and tells me that I am not allowed to remarry for the next 30 days with the exception of remarrying my ex - my response - "That won't be a problem". If you know me, then you know that that statement was dripping with sarcasm. I wonder how a court reporter would have recorded that. I'll never know the answer to that though since there wasn't one present. It was literally myself, my lawyer and the judge in the fairly decent sized courtroom.
10:02 I'm back in my car and on to my next errand - getting the car tags renewed.
10:15 Blow back passenger side tire out on the highway while traveling 65 mph.
10:30 Back on the road after changing the tire and, if I might add, without getting anything on my white dress shirt - yeah that's right, you should be impressed.
10:50 Finish at DMV.
11:30-2:00 Wait for car to be finished getting new tires. Talk about slowing a day down.

I don't actually start my work day until after 2pm. It's only going to get slower, right? Yeah, probably. How long will this day be? I don't know, but I'm guessing long. You might think that I'd be somewhat hyper after an eventful morning - but you'd be wrong... Going back to my post about contingency planning last week - when that tire blew out - I got nothing - no adrenaline dump into my system, no panic, no "what the hell do I do?" - it was down to business. Pull over, change tire, get back on the road. Don't you have AAA? Yes, I do. But why wait for someone to change a tire when I can do it without too much hassle? Just get it done and move on to the next problem. I think that I may be becoming a machine.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. What a fun day. Not. :(

I would not be able to answer the question "Would you please state your full legal name?" so easily... ha ha ha, I still haven't changed my last name. oops.

Andrew said...

Are you planning on changing your name? I never heard what the final verdict was on the name issue. What happened to the melding the last names together to form Skaffilax? Did that get ruled out?

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, it was ruled out. I am going to change my middle name to Ilax and my last name to Skaff after we get back from Aruba (my passport still have my maiden name, so I didn't want to eff with it).

I will miss my last name though :( Plus, cursive S's are so hard to make!!!