plaintiff: brittney from louisville, kentucky. you know what’s wild? when middle-aged people have a young person’s name. trust me, as a “samantha” i am definitely not throwing stones from inside my glass house, i am rapidly approaching the age when i need to pivot to calling myself “susan” or something else that sounds more grown up and will get customer service reps to take me seriously. so many people call me SAMMY and while i love it, i’m also nine hundred years old and it makes me feel weird. anyway, brittney’s old ass is wearing a black polo shirt and sensible gray slacks that are perfect for a woman her age.
defendant: jack from louisville, kentucky. jack looks like any nice dad you’d see down at the parent-teacher function, with his blue checked dress shirt and little square glasses and scruffy salt-and-pepper beard. he absolutely does not look pleased to be in this courtroom today, so either he’s either gonna lose this case or murder everybody in the building. i guess we’ll see!
the complaint: brittney is suing a bar patron and former friend for the cost of an unreturned scooter. a scooter??? A SCOOTER?????? any time i hear the word “scooter” i immediately think of this and scream myself hoarse. (you’re welcome!)
what does she want: $500, which seems...kind of cheap??? wait a fucking minute, is she suing him over a razor scooter?????????
how it went down: brittney starts off by saying she met jack at her bartending job, where he likes to hang out and drink and play texas hold ‘em. here is an unnecessary tangent: i’ve always wondered how and/or when people learn to get good at gambling? indecent proposal is one of my perimenopausal insomnia comfort movies, and when they’re at the casino i’m always like “wait, how the fuck does demi moore just know how to play blackjack? and win on the first try??” it’s one of those things that feels like if you don’t learn it as a kid you look like an idiot trying to learn it as an adult? especially since you’re gonna lose all your money while trying and failing and all of the seasoned gamblers around you just laugh and laugh??? anyway, that’s a (completely batshit) thing i think about (at two in the morning) a lot.
brittney says that she thought jack was a standup guy at first, but now she thinks he’s an alcoholic. (can’t you be a stand up person and also drink a lot?? i’m not a doctor, but...) her ~evidence~ is that he comes to the bar where she works on tuesday and thursday every week and racks up a huge tab with tons of drinks yet doesn’t appear to be drunk after he finishes them, but he’s not violent or aggressive and he always pays his bill at the end of the night. idk man, does a bartender get to diagnose someone as an alcoholic because his tolerance is high? because he almost kinda sounds like a standup fucking guy!!!
jack says that yes he met brittney while playing cards at her bar a couple times a week, and he thought they had formed a good friendship and is taken aback by the way she’s dragging him today! jack says they exchanged numbers and went on dates and “exchanged a couple kisses” and lmao brittney sweety just admit that’s why you’re mad!!!!!! i’m crying at all this armchair diagnosis shit when the real problem was “his broke ass took me to the riverboat instead of on a proper date then we banged and i hated it.” honestly? sue him for that.
okay brittney is keen to move past that dating business and says she bought a scooter from jack’s drunk ass for her son’s birthday. she asked him if the scooter was stolen before she gave him the money and he said no, he’d purchased it legit from his neighbor. brittney gave jack $500 cash and he brought the scooter over, but the next day he told her he needed to “get some things out of it” (excuse me, what?) and she said sure and then he took the scooter and left. hours later she started texting him “hey where r u” (i assume) and got no response until 11pm, when he texted her that he’d be right over. twenty minutes after that jack texted brittney again, this time that he’d been pulled over and the scooter was stolen (gasp!) and that he’d have to give her her money back.
brittney hands greg some highlighted printed out text sheets™ in which jack said he would pay brittney for the scooter a little bit every payday, and brittney hilariously says she doesn’t know why she believed a man with no job would pay her back when he’s not getting a check! okay fine, brittney is funny and is winning me over. except: now jack is saying that after the riverboat date brittney claims didn’t happen, he spent the night at her house and the next morning they got up and he ran errands with her, then she went to work and he asked to use the scooter, then the scooter was stolen from him. ohmygod??? he’s a third party victim of a crime! the way she framed it was like jack had sold her a hot scooter and got caught with it, but he was out running errands (please god i would love to see what “errands” this dude has to do) and someone stole it out from under him! what in the world!!!!!!!!
greg asks jack why he never paid brittney, since he’d offered to pay her, and jack says he’d tried to text brittney to set up the payment plan but couldn’t get ahold of her. mm hmm. in the year 2020 you can’t find this regular person who doesn’t work for the fucking CIA??? yeah right! brittney says she tried to reach out to jack multiple times after he ghosted her, but every time she texted his number he hit her with whatever the old man version of “new phone, who dis” is and she eventually just stopped trying and decided to bring his ass to court so greg could get it from him instead.
the ruling: greg asks jack “so where’s the scooter now?” and jack says, i shit you not, “well judge, it got re-stolen.” this is like watching a movie or reading a carl hiaasen novel, where some hapless fella can’t help but constantly get himself into hilarious predicaments that you might describe as “zany” or whatever, but in real life it’s just lowkey tragic. the scooter he sold brittney got stolen from him after he borrowed it back from brittney, then he got the stolen scooter back and then, somehow!!!!!!!, the scooter got stolen again by someone else????? somebody write this screenplay! you can’t make up luck this bad!!!!!!!!! anyway, if jack hadn’t told brittney in writing that he’d pay her back for the scooter that first time, he might not be on the hook for it now. but he did so he is. judgment for the plaintiff, and for anyone who plays cards against this man ever again.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “well that’s not an alcoholic, ma’am, that’s a lush! call it what it is!!”
*bangs gavel*