9:30 a.m. Miami. This relates to yesterday's final paragraph. The company gave each employee a $25 gift certificate on the 13th. Except Roch, who didn't get his. I called twice and was told it will be with his check on the 20th. Sure enough, it wasn't. Julie called and more sure enough, there aren't any certificates left. So I liberated the company and will, drove out there this morning and gave him mine. (He's got a wife and kids and like what do I need with a grocery certificate.)
I've also paid to have a "criminal record search" done on myself to move into the Riviera. I am most curious to see the results. My contention is that no two legal systems are enough alike to really share accurate information and that any country's jurisdiction should end at its border. I was arrested in Mexico once and was wondering what ever happened to that information. It turns out nothing ever happened.
You see, I have very strong opinions about what constitutes "additional punishment". The American Constitution specifically forbids ongoing and never-ending punishment. Off, you might say isn't someone serving a life sentence precisely in that situation? No that person definitely knows that there will be an end even if the date is not certain. If they want a certain date, that's called execution. All crimes except a life sentence must by law tell the convicted party the exact date and time at which their punishment will stop.
What brought this up is that a friend of mine, Lonnie, had applied for a business license to start her own word processing business. The city of Miami refused to issue her business number due to a felony conviction back in 1967. They felt no need to inform her that if she merely wrote her Social Security number in the blank they would be forced to process the application.
This is precisely the type of situation that the Constitution forbids. The system had their chance to punish her once, and for all, and finally, back in 1967. The system has no right to continue to punish her over and over again for the rest of her life, because she did not receive a life sentence. That may be hard for some people to follow what the law is supposed to be merciful and fair. Refusing to give somebody a business license 35 years later hardly qualifies as either.
Here's a story. In mid-1999 I was working at a furniture factory. The first day I came on shift they handed me a card and said swipe in. I did, and the card reader said "out". I informed the office, who said they would fix it. For the next two months (while I was looking for work in my field) this card work exactly backward. Apparently they had given me the card of somebody who quit and who left without swiping out.
Now the computerized timeclock was fixed so you couldn't swipe the same card twice within an hour. Since I live 30 miles away I wasn't not going to hang around. Therefore I was being paid for the time I wasn't there, that is $700 a week take-home. Each week, I showed them my check, and each week they said they would take care of it. But they never did up till the time I finally quit and left town, considerably richer than when I arrived.
[Author's note: Roch was pronounced “roach” and his middle name was Booz, pronounced “booze”. He probably had a lot of fun with that. The Riviera was a one-bedroom penthouse at 600 NE 25th St in Miami, Florida. I decided against it because they wanted a perpetual lease, which amounted to having to give two years notice if I decided to move. Lonnie was a waitress at the "Kings Table" on North Miami and 54th Ave W. Yes I know it's a black club. I met Colin Powell there once.
Ah, I hear some people asking what was I arrested for in Mexico? A group of us got arrested at the same time. A bunch of my Navy friends and I went carousing in Tijuana when I was 27. The saloon was closing down, so Tony Monster (his real name) called another place who said they were open till four in the morning. So 20 of us piled into three taxis and rode over there.
We arrived at midnight and after the first couple rounds the bar owner decided he wasn't making enough money and said he was closing. Tony disagreed, calling him a liar, and we spent the night in the waiting room of the Tijuana jail because all the cells were full. In the morning we were told to pay a $15 fine each and go back to San Diego.
The catch was, we all had to plead guilty together, including myself who had done nothing wrong. The policeman put the $300 in his shirt pocket. We found out much later that Disturbing the Peace was a felony in Mexico at that time, because somebody noted that the crime we had been charged with was mis-translated as “Inciting a Riot”. None of us spoke Spanish back then.]
