I got a summons for a case where I’m listed as the defendant’s employer. I’ve never had an employee. It was a small claims case over unpaid wages—eleven thousand dollars. The business name on it was one I registered in 1998 and dissolved in 2001. Somehow, it had been active again since 2016, and I had never filed a single thing. The state’s website had my name listed as the registered agent and an address I didn’t recognize.
I went to that address on a Tuesday. It was a house, not an office, and there was no business sign anywhere. I knocked, and the woman who answered the door knew my name before I said it. She looked at the summons in my hand and immediately stepped outside, closing the door behind her. I asked her how she knew me, and she said she’d been expecting me for years. Then she asked why I had waited so long to come.
I told her I had never heard of the business being active again. She looked confused and said the people who ran it had always told her I was the owner. She had been renting a room in the house and said several employees had come there to collect checks. I asked who signed the checks, and she told me the same person had been doing it since 2016. Then she went inside and returned with a cardboard box filled with old payroll records.
The first few pages had employee names, dates, and amounts, but every signature line had been filled out by someone else. At the bottom of one page was a photocopy of my driver’s license. It was an old version I’d lost in 2015 and never thought about again. I asked the woman where she got it, and she pointed toward a locked room upstairs. She said the room belonged to the person who had been running the business. Then she looked at me and quietly added, “He’s been telling everyone you’re coming back soon.”:::
