Felony?!? What Felony??
Did you know you can be charged for a crime that you didn’t commit, based solely on someone else’s word? Yeah, me neither.
Since Kimberly and I have been married we have often said no one would believe a movie about our lives because it’s too farfetched. No one would believe the rapid fire, outlandish situations that just keep happening. No one would believe the downright comedic timing of these events. It’s too ridiculous, it’s unrealistic, right? No. No it’s not, this is really our life. These stories that I will share with you in this blog, really happened, cause you just can’t make this stuff up.
The summer of 2017 we were a bit strapped for cash so I was going to try and get a part time gig to help loosen the burden. One of several ideas I had was to drive an Uber? Seems like a good enough idea. So I applied online, as you do, and after a while, I got my rejection letter. It was a stressful time and I had other irons in the fire so I skimmed the letter. Blah blah… regret to inform you… blah blah… at this time… blah blah felony warrant for your arrest from 2016 in Las Vegas… blah blah blah. I actually laughed. “Yeah… right, felony warrant for my arrest, whatever.” That is CLEARLY some kind of BS misunderstanding. I don’t have time for this. On to the next idea.
Now you might think that a reasonable person would look into this no matter how farfetched it seemed, and you would be right, a reasonable person would. I was not that reasonable person. Here was my thought process. “I have too much going on right now, I haven’t lived in Vegas since 2015, so how could I have an arrest warrant from 2016? I follow the rules, like to the point of ridiculousness. I have this hyper self-standard that I try to hold myself to. I don’t jaywalk, I don’t litter, and to the extreme disappointment and frustration of my wife and kids, I don’t speed either. I drive the speed limit.” Yeah, I’m THAT guy! If you are ever driving down the freeway, in a hurry, and you are bobbing and weaving through traffic and the middle or right lane comes to a screeching crawl because of a truck with a sticker of Batman on the back window that is driving absurdly slow, chances are pretty good, that was me. Driving the exact speed limit. On cruise control. Probably listening to Harry Potter. My bad. So if I follow the rules like THAT, how could that possibly be me that has a warrant for his arrest? Clearly, they are mistaken. What idiots.
Time passes, as it does, and it’s about a year later. I had some personal stuff going on, this was one of the times that my daughters had stopped talking to me. They were still processing me living across the country and were having a difficult time with it. I was working at Hobby Lobby as a store manager, but I had been looking into a District Manager position at Dollar General for a while. I had made it through the interview process to the Divisional Vice President, but he wanted to go with someone with more experience in multi-unit management. I couldn’t be too mad at that, but the Regional Director liked me and the initiative I had, so he asked me to keep checking in with him to see if another position becomes available in the near future. So that was my routine, go to work, take care of business there, every few weeks, check in with the Regional Director.
Then Kimberly calls me at work one day in a mild panic. She told me that she had a bad dream that night and in the dream it turned out that the warrant thing was true and after I found out about it, I drove my car head on into a tree to end my life. Now you have to understand a couple of things here. One, Kimberly is a natural… “Worst Case Scenario, go into Survival Mode” kinda person, particularly at this point in our marriage. She has gotten much better over the years, but back then, she… let me just put it this way, if we were at home and she heard an emergency vehicle siren, she was texting all of the kids to make sure that they were ok. That was her go to. Second, it had been almost a year since I got that email. Nothing ever came of it. We NEVER talked about it. This was completely out of the blue.
“Baby, I need you to call the courts in Las Vegas and make sure that this isn’t a real thing.” Internally I was thinking, “Seriously, you have a “bad dream” about some BS that we got in an email from over a year ago and you want me to spend my lunch hour calling the courts in Las Vegas???” Externally I said, “Ok.”
Now reading that with no context it seems like I just do what my wife tells me to do. “Happy wife, happy life” kind of stuff. I hate that term by the way. It’s so stupid. Anyways, no, that’s not what happened here. I’m just gonna come out and say it. Kimberly has super powers. She has this innate intuition like nothing that I’ve ever seen before. Was I happy about potentially being on hold on the phone with the court for an hour? Not even kind of, but I’ve been burned with not taking her advice before and if I did what she asked and nothing came of it, well there was one less thing to worry about. It had absolutely NOTHING to do with proving her wrong. I’m not like that at all. Ok… that’s not true, but I don’t “like being right”, I just “hate being wrong”. Damn phalanges!!! More on that in the future, that story needs its own post.
Ok, the Vegas valley is made up of 3 different cities. You got, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Henderson. Each of these separate cities has two different court systems, Justice Court and Municipal Court. For those of you doing the math here, that’s six different courts I would need to call. Have you ever had to call the court system? I have, I used to be in Loss Prevention. This…… was gonna take a long while.
I said that I was going to do it so let’s get started. Let’s start with the smaller ones. North town Municipal Court? “Never heard of you.” Justice Court? “No idea what you’re talking about.” Two down. Henderson Municipal Court? “Nope, nothing here.” As I expected! Justice Court? “That’s a negative Ghost Rider.” Why am I wasting my time with this? The courts talk to each other, right? On to the big boys. Las Vegas proper, Municipal Court, “No sir, we have no record of you here.” Goodness gracious, this has taken a long time. Last, but not least, Las Vegas Justice Court. Annnnnnnnnd I’m on hold. For… ev… er!
I text Kimberly, “Baby for real this is stupid, no one knows anything. I’ve called them all and nothing. I’m on hold with the last one and it’s taking too long. I just want to be done with this. It’s dumb.” She replies with 5 words. “Please, I CAN’T lose you.” Uuuuugh!!! I text back, “Fine. I’ll stay on, but my lunch is almost over.” She texts me, “Thank you.”
“Las Vegas Justice Court how may I help you?”
Finally… “Yes, my name is Jason Grice, etc. etc. etc. Will you please just check on this for me, so I can tell my wife that she’s wrong?”
“Oh, yes sir, it’s all right here… warrant for the arrest of Jason Hull Grice, felony burglary. Ohhhh it says that they have video footage too.”
WHAT THE FU…
(Come back next week for Part 2)
