OK, quick anecdote. In the very late eighties, I had an Estée Lauder addiction. Once, at the shore…read moremall, I went for my tri-monthly fix of blue liquid anything. The woman who worked the EL counter was annoyed that a teen was trying to buy her products. In fact, she would not let me buy what I wanted. She suggested a spray hair oil. As I used to be majorly passive, I bought the spray. When I went to use it, I discovered it was broken. Flash forward to the mid-late nineties this time to Center City Philly, Strawbridge's. A well dressed employee was berating her fellow employee loudly, basically telling her to get out of her way. The yellee just smiled and tried her best with her huge, awkward burden to get out of her way. I instantly recognized the yeller as the EL seller from South Jersey. I quickly found out how to complain, and marched up faux Greek temple steps and into the arms of devastating Englishmen. Well, not quite, but I did lodge a complaint about that monster.
Moral of the story: You never know who you will have to deal with in the future- Dike or Medusa.
Which ties in to this review. June Ray, the past clerk, has moved on to be the clerk of Cherokee County. Sometimes, she was OK. Other times, she was not. If I had known that nobody had ever challenged her position as clerk, I would have run for clerk, pigeon toe and all.
The first time I went to the clerk's office, Ms. Ray did not want to give me a copy of my grandmother's will. In the time it took to subtly harass me, she would have finished the task. Sometimes she acted bothered, sometimes she gave you a free copy or extra info. Despite the fact that she kept an all-female staff, I think she liked men better.
Speaking of Ms. Ray's staff, some of them may still be there. And some of them were not so great. One woman was visibly annoyed that she had to work. If you rung the bell for service, most of the women ignored your plea for help. The women who came to the window seemed random; it may have very well been their job to help the public.
The estate clerk was a sweetheart. She was an expert and took the time to educate me.
Here is the crux: We had been trying to evict my deceased father's wife and company from our shared business premises. When my Ashevillian lawyer faxed in a continuance for the case to the clerk's office, she was told that she could not do so. They told her that she had to do it in person. That was a lie. After I fired my lawyer, we went shopping for a local one. One local lawyer told us that he had no problem faxing over continuances.
That means that the clerk's office employees- some of who may still work there presently- had no problem lying to us or wasting hundreds, nay, even thousands of my dollars. Even though my lawyer was going on her third monthly vacation, the employees who refused her continuance fax cost me extra because I had to pay her to work through that problem. Every day that my father's wife and her alcoholic clique stayed at our business caused us to lose business and property (due to destruction and theft). Was someone just in a bad mood that day? Or was it favoritism? An anti-urban/Asheville element? I will never know.
On top of that, later, when I was composing a complaint about my former lawyer to submit to the state bar, I asked an employee to speak with the magistrate, Mr. Wood, whom had presided over my eviction case. The employee told me that he had left the building and told me to go the sheriff's office, as Mr. Wood had headed over there. This may have been a lie. Mr. Wood never showed up at the sheriff's, or he arrived through the back door and hid, or he was still chillin' at the clerk's office. (In a bizarre twist, the Sheriff's office gave me the same runaround.)
Ironically, if you want to complain about a clerk, you have to ask to talk to a magistrate. You may be thwarted from doing so. Even worse, Mr. Wood, who campaigned to become the new clerk after Ray left, was found to have acted unethically while he was a magistrate. Can you imagine if he had become clerk?
We may provide through taxes the salary of the clerk and the employees who work at the clerk's office. We deserve to be treated justly and fairly. We are their job security. If nobody needed wills or judgement documents, they would not have a job. In the end, this clerk's office affected my past, present, and future- both positively and negatively. I hope you have better luck.
Note: Mr. Hunter Plemmons is the new clerk.
Re: Yelp review on the Sheriff's Office of Haywood County.
