Scruples Lost and Found in the County Courthouse
The Scruples Jazz Razzmatazz
Once upon a time, forty years or more ago, I lost my wallet in a public phone booth at the Pierce County Courthouse. Not until a fifty mile drive home and more than four hours later did I realize what I had done.
I had just argued - and lost - my first professional appearance in court on some type of discovery motion. It was my litigation baptism by fire. In my former law firm there was no “namby-pamby mentoring” (as the senior partners derisively called it). They trained lawyers Teddy Roosevelt-style: they turned on the billing meters, threw their baby lawyers head first into the deep end of the pool and let them learn to swim.
Or drown.
I am not sure whether I ever really learned how to swim because, forty years or more since then, I am still practicing law and I still feel like I’m drowning.
I didn’t know it at the time, but forty years or so ago, one of the law firm’s senior partners had created the situation that generated the goofy discovery motion that the former senior law partner knew he would lose. And that’s exactly why the impossible mission of arguing the impossible motion - the opposing lawyer was a local patrician of the Pierce County bar and the judge’s law school fraternity brother - fell to me, the youngest, greenest, and lowest paid associate on the law firm totem pole.
And that’s why - unsurprisingly - having lost the unwinnable motion drafted by a senior lawyer in my office, and after having been slapped with a $100 award of ‘sanctions’ for even arguing such a ridiculous motion (against the judge’s law school fraternity brother) - I (distraught and distracted) was reporting by telephone from a public phone booth my humiliating failure to the ‘home office’ where (so I assumed) my career in law had just ended.
In today’s money, $100 might buy you a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. More than 40 years ago, however, $100 was ‘real money.’ Worse than the monetary fine, however, was the stinging rebuke, the humiliation of being dressed down in court (by the judge who was opposing counsel’s law school fraternity brother). So, for me, this was the end of the Earth.
Except that no one at my law firm seemed to remember what the motion was all about.
No one (except me) thought that the motion was at all important.
And, more than likely, no one at my law firm office even remembered who I was!
Now for those too young to know (or for those too old to remember) what a phone booth is, we need to go back and define our terms.
A phone booth was a kind of communication pod, like a big cell phone. Instead of holding it to your ear, you stepped inside it.
A phone booth was about the size of an “affordable housing” micro-apartment like those being constructed all over the place today. In such a booth you could use a “pay telephone” that connected by copper wire to a main switching station. The pay phone did not take photographs. It did not transfer funds. It did not play music.
The normal phone booth didn’t spy on you or catalog your political or shopping preferences or record your location or your supposedly private conversations. It could only be used to make telephone calls. For long distance calls, you had to keep feeding it coins.
For those who are fans of the “Dr. Who” BBC science fiction series, a phone booth resembles the Doctor’s time-traveling TARDIS that was itself disguised as an old London police call box. To use a phone booth, you entered like Superman about to change into his leotard, closed the folding door, dropped coins in the slot, lifted the handset and then dialed or punched in your number. Or maybe two (or more) not-so-super people entered into a phone booth to change into leotards... or to do drug deals... all of which contributed to the elimination of the phone booth.
In any event, phone booths became totally obsolete with the advent of digital telecommunications.
Rotary dials and push-buttons are also obsolete.
Coins are obsolete.
Wallets are obsolete.
So.
Forty years ago I drove away from the courthouse and, in one of those lobby phone booths, I left my wallet full of cash (if you remember what “cash” used to be), all of my credit cards, my driver’s license, my library book (... ¿¿¿book???...) borrowing card, my business cards, my Social Security card and just about everything else that defined who and what we are in these United States of America. Leaving your wallet in a public phone booth back then is like leaving your cell phone on a park bench today.
The Pierce County Courthouse is a busy place. Then and now, its halls were full of the accused, the accursed and the abnormal (depending on your own abnormal definition of ‘normality’).
Plus a whole bunch of police, divorcing couples, debtors, debt-collectors, alleged drunk drivers, muggers, witnesses, voyeurs, shop-lifters, self-styled scrofulous Prophets of the Apocalypse, grifters, blackmailers, discharged jurors, pro se litigants, fraudsters, bail-jumpers, bail bondsmen, prostitutes, their pimps, Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, handlers and enablers (Sorry for the bad joke: you’ll never see those people in a courthouse!), parole-violators, clerks, bailiffs, scofflaws, dog-nappers, carjackers, litterbugs, drug users, drug dealers, the children of all of the above... and lots of other lawyers. That is to say the entire menagerie of humankind - the Good, the Bad and the Borderline Insane - was represented in the courthouse lobby.
So kiss that wallet goodbye, I assumed. And the money and the credit cards.
And my career.
Except that someone nice found my wallet in the phone booth and turned it in to somebody else at the information desk in the lobby. And that someone turned it in to the Sheriff’s office. And someone in the Sheriff’s office looked inside the wallet, saw my business cards and learned whose wallet it was.
‘Stupid lawyer!‘ some Sheriff’s deputy must have thought. And then the deputy mailed the wallet back to me by ordinary mail.
No money was missing. My credit cards had not been used. My identity had not been stolen. Nothing was out of place.
Faith in humanity restored. At least until my next adventure in Court.
* * *
That was forty or more years ago.
I am not particularly nostalgic for those times, for they were, truthfully speaking, no better and no worse than today. More than likely, back then I was lucky that my wallet had been found by an honest person. There are honest people out there today, too. Probably just as many. It’s just harder to find them because everyone seems to be hiding in foxholes.
These days, I get a lot of spam on my computer. Most of the email traffic I receive goes into the digital waste basket unopened. Every day I am hit by a tsunami of phishing emails, spoofs and frauds. Unfortunately, the spoofers and fraudsters are getting better, probably due to AI. In fact, spoofers and fraudsters seem to be the principal users of AI. That and the military which uses it to kill people faster.
Progress.
Back when I was a second year law student, I remember picking up a wrong number call and getting into a friendly hours-long anonymous conversation with someone I didn’t know, whose name I never learned and from whom I’ve never heard again. It seemed perfectly normal, perfectly harmless.
At the time.
Today, I’d be concerned that my voice would have been recorded and given the large language model training treatment only to reappear re-synthesized as “me” placing bogus orders for airplane tickets to facilitate human trafficking, ordering heroin by the ton, and directing my bank to transfer all my money to the Ukraine.
Today, I don’t answer any phone calls if there is no accompanying caller ID that I recognize or if the ID is just some generic town or city where I don’t know anybody. I get a lot of emailed requests for legal advice, some of it borderline illegal or unethical, that might be AI bots that have scraped my contact information off the Web. I don’t answer them, either. I get a lot of real estate calls from bottom-feeding developers who want to buy (and resell) my house sight unseen.
Scammers and impostors have always been around. Today, however, the scammers and impostors are able to victimize folks with the greatest of ease. A blast email to millions of recipients or a mass telephone scam enabled by banks of automatic dialers won’t fool all of the people all of the time, but they will fool enough of the people enough of the time to make the return on their investment worthwhile.
A close relative recently bought a new car when his old one died. Within days of closing the transaction, he was bombarded with sundry solicitations for extended warranties sold by dozens of Shifting Sand Insurance Companies each offering various indecipherable policies of dubious and highly porous warranty coverage for automobiles he didn’t buy from dealers he’d never heard of. All “personally curated” just for him, of course.
Now that I’ve mentioned something about buying a new car in this post, the data-scraping AI bots will probably start bombarding me with solicitations for extended warranties sold by dozens of Shifting Sand Insurance Companies each offering indecipherable policies of dubious and highly porous warranty coverage for automobiles I didn’t buy from dealers I’ve never heard of.
I have had a few clients over the decades who have been, or who were about to be taken in. One I managed to talk out of the old Nigerian bank fund fraud. Or, least, I tried to talk him out of it. But people believe in Magic and they believe in Luck. I never heard from him again. So maybe he did fly off to Lagos, my advice notwithstanding, to collect his tens of millions of illicit dollars. Or he’s still there being held for ransom. Another client was taken in by the “damsel in distress” scam where “she” urgently needed her unknown savior to ransom “her” from the dungeons of some shadowy criminal outfit in some lawless part of the World (which today might as well be Capitol Hill in Washington DC).
I know other folks who have been taken in by lottery-scammers and whose retirement accounts were looted of huge sums of money. You know, these are the con artists who contact you out of the blue with elaborate stories about how you’ve won millions and millions of dollars in this sweepstakes or the other, but you have to keep it absolutely hush hush because, yah de yah de dah, and you need to simply pay the taxes upfront and provide us with your bank account information so we can make a direct deposit because, you know, these are scary times and we won’t just mail such a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE CHECK to you, and yah de yah de dah!
I think that older folks are particularly susceptible to this kind of scam. Life has been hard and the last few laps of the race are even harder. At last, they think, something wonderful has happened.
The older folks always believed in fairy tales and they believed in all the social, political and economic institutions that, they cannot admit, have deceived and bilked them all their lives. I understand that because I also believed in fairy tales. Or I wanted to. But, you know, lawyers tend to offset that kind of naivete with a career-long diet of bitter herbs and regular courtroom beat-downs.
Generally speaking, the senior victims of such spoofs are credulous because they want to believe. It’s like hypnosis - it only works on people who want to be hypnotized. They are gullible. They are easy marks. They get taken in by the authentic looking letter, the fake web site, the artificially intelligent schmooze. Mostly, they get snookered by the sincere sounding flimflam man who talks ever so credibly like he knows you personally and like he knows what he’s talking about.
Who can blame the victims? The flimflammers of the world seem just like so many of the politicians and business leaders in our 21st Century world.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, you get elected to high public office.
Or you become a trillionaire who slings IPOs on the stock market.
Within the last six months, I have received multiple formal “notices” on letterhead paper from Canadian lawyers (so called) advising me that various wealthy and heretofore unknown relatives - Alan, George, Mark and Maria among them - have died fabulously wealthy, but, alas, intestate (sob, sob). But! No other direct heirs having come forward, oodles of unclaimed money [$$$$$$$$$$$$$$!!!!] could all be mine (minus a hefty percentage paid to the so-called Canadian lawyer as a contingency fee, of course), if only I will contact him and begin the - certain to be secret and convoluted - process of transferring this “unclaimed wealth” to me from the previously unknown deceased relative (tax free, of course, if I follow their careful instructions).
I have never, ever heard of any of these long-lost relatives. Although all of these letters are very similar, they purport to be from different “law firms,” written in pompous legalese, from pompous sounding phony law firms, that have pompous sounding offices in Canadian cities that don’t exist... and whose envelopes bear American postage stamps postmarked by the USPS in the vicinity of certain large state prisons.
* * *
Once upon a time, forty years or more ago, I lost my wallet in a public phone booth. Some anonymous stranger found it and returned it.
That was the Pacific Northwest at that time. Perhaps again? Everywhere could be a little smaller, a little less cosmopolitan, a little more honest kind of place. Perhaps, that cultural sense of decency has to start at the top, just like rot and corruption do. Or does it?
Were it up to me, I would opt for a world where your lost wallet gets returned; a little more thoughtful world with somewhat higher scruples and principles than what we have been told our scruples and principles ought to be, as told to us by those who have no scruples or principles.
This, then, is a song for human-scale people and places. Not in the past, but going forward. I call it The Scruples Jazz Razzmatazz.
‘Razzmatazz’ because this composition is considerably more complicated than what I’ve previously posted. It has three layers laid down over five days.
I used a new instrument - a Yamaha FGDP-50 Finger Drum Pad - to add some light percussion and symbols. This is not a digital drum pad that you strike with sticks. It’s literally a small digital pad with a couple of hundred ‘kits’ that you can play by drumming your fingers. The finger pads are laid out something like in the format of a trap set. They are pressure and velocity sensitive. It seems simpler than it is and I quickly discovered that playing the ‘drums’ is not easy. I think that one of this SubStack’s subscribers could teach me a thing or two about laying down a decent percussion line.
The other device I employed for this song was to add a third layer - a Hammond B3 accompaniment loaded into the E-Mu synth. I merged the various audio tracks using Audacity software. I also used Audacity to insert a short wah-wah pedal effect.
Regardless whether any of this is ‘music,’ it’s certainly fun. No AI required. As a one-man recording studio, I can compose and perform something almost as ragged as played by my old high school rock band.
Yes, I’m still practicing law to scratch out a living. But to paraphrase Karl Marx’s observations about an ideal society, it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to practice law in the morning, to tend the garden in the afternoon, to compose music in the evening, and to read books or write SubStack stories at night.
The Scruples Jazz Razzmatazz:
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