the plaintiff: jennifer from fort wayne, indiana, in a black blazer and royal blue shirt, looking like serious soccer mom business.
the defendant: kristine from fort wayne, indiana. she’s wearing a cold-shoulder shirt, an item of clothing whose very existence i would like to sue. is that slim patch of shoulder-front skin so hot that it actually needs an air hole? who invented these? put that monster in jail!
the complaint: jennifer says that kristine is a drunk and a pathological liar who claimed to be an heir to the hershey family fortune, and she hired her to paint a garage door. uhhh, are the kisses and shit not selling like they used to?
what does she want: $3600 for breach of contract. countersuit time! kristine wants $750 for unpaid labor, and from the way she is aggressively shuffling her paperwork slash evidence there’s gotta be a bombshell somewhere within them.
how it went down: jennifer and kris known each other for 15+ years, and jennifer says kris is a bartender and a big partier and a pathological liar. she says she lives in a big house and drives an audi but when jennifer filed her small claim she found out that kris in fact lives in a trailer and drives a chevy. jennifer also found out that kris has an extensive criminal record including, but not limited to: OWI, battery, disorderly conduct, and theft.
kris says she’s known jennifer for a long time because she’s a bartender and jennifer is a heavy drinker. kris says they aren’t really friends, jennifer would just come into her bar every single night of the week. i am at an age where simply hearing that sentence makes me liver seize up. i can’t even drink a full-sugar coca cola anymore, let alone take my ass to a bar every night of the week. first of all, who’s gonna put on my bra and shoes after 5pm. anyway, jen hired kris to paint her doors, her windows, her trim, and her cabinetry and she agreed to get it done in 8-10 days.
between june 10 and july 8 kris showed up 4 times. FOUR TIMES IN FOUR WEEKS. jen says she lived without privacy for over a month because kris took the doors off and didn’t fix them and never showed up to finish the job.
jennifer pulls out a bunch of photographs of her “unlivable” house and garage, and kris says she would’ve completed the work except jennifer kept adding new tasks to the list of shit she wanted done that she’d never agreed to. this is why you can’t do business with your friends. they’ll just keep adding shit for you to do and not paying you for it or, if you’re the other friend, the friend you hired is gonna never show up for work and have you pissing in a house with no privacy.
the ruling: sometimes while watching this show judge mathis will jump to a conclusion that doesn’t appear to have been found in evidence and makes me feel like i blinked and missed a vital bit of information, either that or there was some editing trickery or something. i’ll be watching and all of a sudden it’s like, “wait? the case is over??” i have been to several tapings of the show, and once won a t-shirt as a prize for a joke-telling contest doyle the bailiff held between cases. after each case they encourage the people on the aisles to get up and “mill around” in the background while the combatants do their post-case interviews in the hall and the judge retires to his chambers, then everyone comes back in and doyle acts as a hype man between sets, including hosting impromptu joke battles. i told a joke about superman and won a judge mathis shirt i should have been too embarrassed to wear in public but wasn’t.
anyway so kris reads three pages of text messages and proves the judge’s point that she never clarified what her rate for doing the extra work was, but i thought she was suing for the work she’d already done? and i have rewound this part three times and i’m not 100% sure i get why but her case is soundly dismissed and jennifer’s is granted. it’s clear the judge is over it, which makes me super curious what they cut. ah well, who cares. i’m sure kris can sell some black market kit kats to come up with her judgment.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “bartender? did the hershey family cut you off?!”
*bangs gavel*