"I serve dead people..."

As I was thinking about the topic of this post, I came to the realization that nearly all of my work-related posts are about my part time job as a County Constable. I started to ponder that, and quickly came to the realization that not much noteworthy happens to a QA Engineer, while Constables do tend to end up being involved in the weird on a more frequent basis than you might imagine.

Back to the topic of the post, last night I had yet another opportunity to try to serve someone a legal paper after they have departed this life. It wasn't intentional. It just so happens that when people expire, they often leave loose ends that at some point do need to be tied up. In last night's example, a woman had been killed in a car accident about one month ago. Not knowing this, a company which held a judgment against her obtained a court order for her to appear and answer questions about her income.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. Contrary to popular belief, there is no crack team that jumps to action notifying the world when someone dies. Processes go on as usual until something happens to make various entities aware of a death - be it a family member returning a bill, a phone call from someone, or even a Constable trying to serve a court order. Even more shocking for many is that despite its status as a quasi-governmental agency, a Constable's office does not do extensive background checking on each individual they are tasked to serve. There is simply not enough manpower, and even if there were, it would be impractical to waste it in that manner. It is a far more efficient thing to just deal with anomalies as they come on a case by case basis.

That being said, there is still something sad about remaining family having to tell a Constable standing on their front porch that the person who is subject to the order in their hands has passed away. I can only imagine that they must wonder "Why didn't they already know this?"

After such incidents, the remaining procedure is pretty straightforward. After verifying that the person is indeed dead (You would be surprised at the lies people will perpetuate to avoid going to court...), the plaintiff in the case is notified and most of the time that is where it ends. Unless there was a huge amount of money involved, very few would try to collect from a deceased person's estate. It is instead written off, and the costs passed along to the consumer.

This doesn't happen often. I've worked as a Constable for seven years, and I've only had to deal with this a handful of times. Most of the time, a gentle apology for disturbing the surviving family is all that's needed. However, there have been two times where the survivors have gotten upset, and in both cases I've become quite upset myself. A large HMO that operates most of the hospitals in the area in which I live used to be very active in pursuing payments for their services, even to the point of filing lots of lawsuits over these medical bills. Not once, but TWICE I have been sent out to serve one of these summonses only to find that the defendant died while in the care of the hospital. It seems to me that maybe they should have had a check box somewhere on the billing form that said "PATIENT DECEASED - DO NOT SUE."

Now the really weird stuff involves serving someone in a coma, or otherwise mentally incapacitated. But I'll leave that for another day.