The summer after I graduated from highschool, I got a temporary job with a friend of mine helping out at the
law firm his
mother worked at. It was
pleasantly mindless- mostly I spent my days
photocopying legal documents. One fun perk was that I got to peruse said documents while the
photocopier was running a batch. The vast majority were very boring but once in a while something interesting would turn up. By far the weirdest case I ever came across was a lawsuit between two business neighbors, the
plaintif having apparantly done something to piss off the
defendant, who kept harassing the guy by calling him names and leaving
threatening letters and dead chickens at his door. On a weirdness level, this pattern culminated in the defendant leaving -and I saw a photo of this in the legal documents- a severed chicken's foot wrapped up in a paper on which the defendant's name, Javier, was written all over the place.
I don't know if this is some sort of traditional, cultural way of saying, "I am insane and you have pissed me off," or if the guy came up with this on his own, but... damn. And if it is traditional, how are you supposed to respond? Obviously Javier took the guy to court, but is there some sort of response-in-kind, like pig entrails or something like that? Anyway, in my circle of friends, "Javier! Javier! Javier!" has become shorthand for, "That was an inappropriate response, and one that looks more than a little crazy."