One of the hazards of not changing the address on your mail, drivers license, and so forth when you move, is that there are occasionally some things you may really need to receive and which can get you into trouble should you not get them. I don’t speak from experience. I’m thorough and quick about changing my address everywhere as soon as I know where I am moving. The previous owners of this house still haven’t managed to get that small detail done, and so, we still get tons of mail for them … even though I took it up with the postal service and sent tons of stuff back over the years with “Not at this address” written on the front.

Those of you who have been reading my babbling for the last three or so years might remember that they used to come by all the time to either check the mailbox themselves or to ask me if they had gotten any mail. It didn’t bother me for the first month or so, because we did decide on the house and close on it rather quickly. There is always a little overlap on when mail gets forwarded to a new location. At the end of the first year, I realized they just weren’t going to bother doing anything about it, so I talked to the post master who informed me there wasn’t much I could do. Then I spent a good six months sending stuff back to the senders trying to get the point across to them. By the beginning of the third year, I simply started throwing it in the trash … after looking it over to see who was sending stuff, of course.

Hospital bills, Medicare letters, information from lawyers, Social Security letters, personal mail, credit card and bank statements, bills for cell phones, all manner of mail coming to my home, and it was all the sorts of things you A) would want to receive and B) wouldn’t want other people to have due to the personal information hiding inside. Every last bit of it the kinds of things you would shred before tossing in the trash for fear someone would steal your identity. I even once had a Sheriff’s Deputy on my front porch looking to serve a warrant, and had to prove they no longer lived here. The previous owners moved away, but the paperwork on their lives continues to reside here.

This evening I finally remembered to go check the mail, and tucked in among the bills and letters addressed to us was a letter from the Travis County Jury Management Office. I saw the back of the postcard first and had a moment of panic thinking I had missed a jury call (or Lin had), but when I turned it over, it was for the previous owner. One of the any letters Lin or I had tossed in the trash without paying attention to must have been a call to jury duty, because now there’s this postcard saying a jury summons was missed, you better respond … or else.

The “or else” in this case is having a warrant put out for your arrest followed by an appearance in a courtroom during which you have to explain why you didn’t respond to the summons. If the judge finds your “cause” to be feeble, which I would think “I didn’t get the letter because the address on my drivers license isn’t where I have been living the last 3+ years” wouldn’t pass muster, you can be fined between $100 and $1000, spend 3 days to six months in jail, or both … all depending on what sort of court summoned you in the first place. For the record, the higher end of the penalties are actually for Texas’s own, more local, court systems and much worse than the lower end which applies to skipping jury duty at a federal court … and Texas does issue warrants on a regular basis for skipping out on your summons.

Of course, H.V. isn’t going to respond to this card any more than she responded to the initial summons, because she doesn’t know a damn thing about it … being as she is still pretending to be living at this address, for some unfathomable reason. I suspect this may eventually lead to another Sheriff’s Deputy on my front porch at some later date. I guess I better make sure I have my proof they don’t live here anymore handy, just in case.