I Got Served Today. For $89.64.

Eric Rex — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:47:45 GMT

There are life milestones you plan for. First car. First house. First time you realize you are the oldest person at a concert.

Then there are the ones that just show up at your front door on a Wednesday afternoon holding a clipboard.

Today I got served. First time ever. A real process server, standing on my porch, asking if I was me, and handing me an official envelope from the judicial system of my county. The kind of envelope that makes your stomach drop before you have read a single word.

Behind me, two small humans were frozen in the hallway with eyes the size of dinner plates.

The Scene

Let me set it properly. The doorbell rings. I open it. A polite stranger asks my name. I confirm it, because I am an honest person and also because I had no idea what was about to happen. He hands me the paperwork, says the words "you have been served," and walks off like he does this forty times a day, which he probably does.

I turn around. My kids are staring at me.

"Dad, what does that mean?"

"Are you in trouble?"

"Are the police coming?"

"Is that a subpoena?" (This one watches too much TV.)

I did the thing every parent does when they have no idea what is going on: I said "it's fine" in a voice that communicated it was absolutely not fine, and then I opened the envelope.

The Crime

Eighty-nine dollars and sixty-four cents.

That is it. That is the entire thing. A medical bill from a visit I barely remember, for an amount that would not cover a nice dinner for two, had escalated all the way to a summons.

Not a call. Not a text. Not a "Hey, quick reminder, you have a small balance." Somewhere between the appointment and my front porch, a series of systems, vendors, and handoffs decided the most efficient path to collecting $89.64 was to involve a court.

I would have paid it. Instantly. Enthusiastically, even. If anyone had sent me a bill I could actually find and read, I would have paid it while standing in line for coffee. Instead, I got a legal document and two children who now think I am a fugitive.

Where the Process Broke

I spend my professional life building and fixing operational systems, so I could not help doing a post-mortem on my own porch.

Somewhere in this chain, a bill was generated. Maybe it went to an old address. Maybe it landed in a patient portal I have logged into exactly once. Maybe it was one of those statements that looks identical to the eleven explanation-of-benefits letters that say "THIS IS NOT A BILL" in giant letters, so your brain learns to file all of them in the recycling.

Then it aged. Thirty days. Sixty. Ninety. At each step, a system did exactly what it was configured to do, which is the problem. Nobody asked whether the configuration made sense. Nobody looked at the account and thought, "This is under a hundred dollars and this person has never missed a payment. Maybe send a text."

Instead, it hit a threshold, got handed to collections, hit another threshold, got handed to a law firm, hit another threshold, and generated a filing. Every handoff was technically correct. The overall outcome was absurd.

That is the part that gets me. There was no villain here. No one person decided to sue me over $89.64. A process decided to sue me. And processes do not feel embarrassed.

The Cost of the Process

Let us do some quick math on what it took to collect this debt.

A billing department generated statements. A collections agency bought or was assigned the account. A law firm reviewed it, drafted a complaint, and filed it. A court clerk processed it. A process server drove to my house. Multiple humans touched this thing, each getting paid, over a balance that is less than the filing fee in most jurisdictions.

If the goal was to collect $89.64, this was the most expensive way imaginable to do it. If the goal was to generate a summons, it worked flawlessly.

This is what happens when you optimize each step of a pipeline in isolation and nobody owns the end-to-end outcome. The billing team's metric is "statements sent." The collections team's metric is "accounts escalated." The law firm's metric is "cases filed." Everyone hit their number. The customer got served.

The Lesson (Besides "Pay Your Bills")

Yes, I should have paid the bill. I am not pretending otherwise. But I also know that "the customer should have caught it" is what every broken process says about itself.

Good systems are built for the way people actually behave. People miss mail. People ignore portals. People have two kids and a job and a chicken coop and a leaky faucet. A process that only works when the human on the other end is perfectly attentive is not a process. It is a trap with a cover sheet.

The fix is not complicated. Before you escalate, make sure you actually reached the person. A phone call. A text. An email with the amount in the subject line. Some check, any check, that asks "did this person ever see this?" before you hand it off to someone with a law degree.

I will be paying the $89.64 this week, plus whatever creative fees have attached themselves along the way. I will also be explaining to my children, again, that Dad is not going to jail.

And the next time I am in a meeting where someone proposes an automated escalation path with no human checkpoint, I am going to think about a man with a clipboard on my porch, and two kids in the hallway, and I am going to ask one question.