Eric and the Lawsuit

So, I was sued yesterday.  Well, actually my wife and I were both sued separately for the same thing, and it wasn’t yesterday it was March 7.  She was served two sets of paperwork yesterday for both of us.  That’s a pretty weird feeling.  I mean, it’s a terrible feeling, but it’s kind of the top of a pretty terrible pile of terrible feelings.  It’s kind of hard to explain, but we have had several years of bad things happen that are mostly our fault and have all had pretty decent silver linings so far.  Starting with the completely unplanned pregnancy of our 3rd child to yesterday we haven’t had the best luck (I don’t believe in luck, but it seemed like the best term to get my point across), but we have been blessed enough to be able to keep moving forward.

Getting served papers is a surefire way to realize that you are an adult.  I may be twice the age that it takes to be considered legally an adult, I may be married with three children, and I may have a mortgage, but when someone shows up at your door asking your name and handing you legal looking papers you will know that you have made it to adulthood.  

Basically, we borrowed money from a company that loans money to people that need money.  You don’t need to lecture me on how big of a mistake that is, I know.  I knew when I borrowed the money as it was far from the first time that we had done it.  We have borrowed a lot of money from a lot of different institutions over the years.  This wasn’t even the first time we had borrowed from this specific business.  We had always paid back the money we borrowed along with the astronomically high interest.  High interest is just something that you have to put up with when you go to these places.  When we borrowed this money, the largest sum we had ever borrowed from anyone, we had absolutely every intention of paying it back too.

In the summer of 2014 we had our amazing surprise baby and we bought a house.  All of the expenses involved in buying a house added up more than we ever knew possible (this doesn’t even take into account the new amount of money spent on daycare and diapers).  I can’t say how my wife feels about it now, but if I had known how much of a hassle it would be to buy a house I would have kept renting.  I do love my house and I love owning a house, but I don’t like hassle or stress (I know that no reasonable person does, but I like it less than most people do [I can’t really prove that because I haven’t met most of the people* ])

Anyway, we needed some money after all of this and took out a loan.  We made payments on it for a few months, but then our plant slowed way down and eventually closed completely 14 months later.  Unfortunately, my wife and I both worked at the same place so that was kind of sucky.  I told the people about this situation and they said they wanted to work with us, but we didn’t really have any money so that was hard for them to understand.  They asked if I could borrow some money from friends or relatives.  If that had been the case we would never have borrowed money from them in the first place.  I haven’t quite figured out the silver lining to this situation yet, but I’m sure it’ll show up eventually.  I doubt it will be as good as having a whole new person and a house, but here’s hoping.

It may surprise you to learn that I’m not a lawyer.  So, I looked into my options on how to handle this thing and they don’t seem great or easy.  I have to file and answer to the citation within a certain number of days.  I don’t know what an answer is because there isn’t really a question on the citation.  I think it’s just a response to it though.  I don’t know what to say other than “hey, you got me”.  If I do nothing the court will probably do something called a default judgement.  I think that just means that I will really owe them the money that I already owe them.    The internet has led me to believe that they aren’t allowed to garnish my wages in Texas, so there’s a plus I never knew about.  I have every intention of paying all of the money back that I owe whenever I am financially stable with a steady income, but that’s not today.  I feel bad about it, but I don’t know what else I can do.

I am generally a negative person.  It’s my default setting.  I don’t necessarily like that about myself, but I think it helps me see through more bullshit that most happy people (I’m open to that just being a justification I made up for my terrible mood).  I guess it’s not the best way to live a life and it certainly takes its toll.  In the last year and a half my attitude has begun to slowly change (emphasis on slowly) towards being more positive.  I like to think it’s because I started going to church, but I think the change started a few months before that.  I could point out that I lost a lot of stress when I was fired (laid off, whatever, same result) from my job, but that gave me all new stresses.  I suppose the new stresses were probably slightly lower than the old stresses, but I also lost a sense of purpose.  So, maybe that’s not it.  I have also spent almost all day every day with my two smallest children.  That’s a whole different kind of stress, but also makes me feel a little happy.  I don’t know.  Maybe God was working on me before I started going back to church, maybe.

As nice as all of that is though there has been a tremendous amount of negativity.  Last year was difficult for me for multiple reasons that I don’t need to get into.  The point is that, and I don’t have specificexamples for this, every time I feel even slightly productive something bad happens to me that gets me down for longer than anything should get anyone down.  Yesterday was no exception, but I decided not to let it win and I am writing this thing right now to prove to it that it won’t win this time.  I’m sorry if this was too negative or boring.  I hate it when people whine about bad things that happen to them even though it’s clearly their fault.  I don’t want you to feel that way about me or this.  I know that I messed up and I am accepting responsibility.  I just wanted to write about a thing that happened to me and how I felt about it.  Thanks for reading

Eric Anderson

P.S.  This is not the thing I mentioned that I was “working on” in the last post.  Sorry, again.

* This joke has been stolen and paraphrased from the excellent Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant rom-com Two Weeks Notice.