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COURTHOUSE EXPERIENCE IN ELLSWORTH, MAINE
By CarolynCHolland(9,556)
“That’s Yankee ingenuity,” the man at an adjacent table called to us as he saw how Monte and I were copying deeds.
In our previous visit to the Hancock County (Maine) Courthouse Monte and I had learned we could use any equipment that operated on battery but we couldn’t plug into the electric outlets. Someone suggested it was because the courthouse didn’t want to be held responsible for damages if there was a power surge. But at the price of $1.00 per Xerox copy, we thought it might be an economic decision. Either way, we could run my laptop computer but not my scanner (scanners aren’t battery operated), so we couldn’t make copies like we had done in libraries.
On our first visit to the courthouse we sat and made a list of the deeds we wanted copied, quite an extensive list. Then they told us we could look them up on the Internet, but if we wanted copies off the Internet we would be charged $1.25. As difficult as it was to read the original copies it was naturally harder to read them on the computer screen (Monte checked out the website), especially in the quarter page allowance that was given on screen.
Then we got an idea. We already had an electric converter so I could run my laptop in the car. By adding a small battery, we could convert electric power to run my scanner without using an electrical outlet. So finally Monte purchased a lawnmower battery. When we returned to the courthouse we were prepared. I carried my briefcase with laptop and scanner. Monte carried a cloth bag with the adapter and battery. We set up at a corner table and went to work, very good teamwork. Soon a staff member came up with a quizzical expression (we weren’t near an outlet) and asked how we were powering the scanner. Gradually other staff and miscellaneous courthouse users stopped by. We were attracting attention while we were accomplishing our work. Suddenly a man across the room called out, “That’s Yankee ingenuity!” Monte had been concerned the lawnmower battery would run out of “gas” but the laptop battery quit first, after 75 minutes. We went two doors down to the library, plugged my laptop to an outlet and used the library computers to check our E-mail while waiting for the battery to charge. Then we returned to the courthouse and completed our job---not every deed, but what I felt was the most important. There are still some more recent deeds to scan on our next trip, but for now I think I have what I need for my novel, all 160 pages of them.
And all it took was a little bit of Yankee ingenuity. After all, I am a New Englander!
One further note: Monte is impressed---as am I---by the way we can walk in and out of the courthouse with no guards or metal detectors. We were told the guards could stop us at any time and check us out, but they never did. It was quite different from entering the courthouses in southwestern Pennsylvania, where we felt we’d have quite a problem carrying in and setting up the kind of equipment we used in Hancock County. | |
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Posted to ProBlogs.com on Monday, January 01, 2007
View other posts by CarolynCHolland
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