Putting an End to Gonlon Davidescu

A couple of years ago, I had a problem with someone by the name of Gonlon Davidescu — I thought I was rid of him and that I would never hear of him again since I informed the jury people that there was no such person and that it was simply my name, misspelled.

A few months ago I got a jury duty questionnaire for — not me. I did jury duty in January, and so I don’t have to worry about doing jury duty in New York for at least four years. Rather, this jury duty questionnaire was for Gonlon Davidescu. What I should have done at this point was to have filled out the questionnaire and have written in that Gonlon Davidescu did not exist and to maybe explain what had previously happened.

I remembered what the person at the jury duty office had told me a couple of years earlier — that they got their names from the records of voter registration, and I never got around to correcting the duplicate entry there. I resolved to go to the voter registration office as soon as I could.

A month passed and I still hadn’t done anything — I have a tendency to procrastinate. I got a notification that Gonlon was being delinquent and that he should fill out the questionnaire as soon as possible. The first thing I did, however, was to go to the voter registration office and had them look me up — all of me — and to make it clear to them who was real and who was not.

It turns out that there were four entries for me all together. There were two for Gordon Davidescu — one in Queens and one in Manhattan, and there were two for Gonlon Davidescu. I explained who was real and who was not and had them print out documents that made it clear that this was the case.

The people in the voter registration office also made inactive all instances of me that were not the real me — in other words, Gonlon would never be submitted as a jury duty candidate again because he was inactive in their database. Why could they not just delete the entry? I have no idea, but if inactive means that I don’t get submitted again, that’s good enough for me.

Neither Gonlon nor myself filled out the questionnaire and so a little while later I got a notification that Gonlon had to show up to the court to explain why he had not answered the questionnaire. That’s exactly what I get for procrastinating. The notification said that I had to be there at nine thirty in the morning and so that is exactly when I marched into the the court. About thirty seconds later I walked out with my head hung low, having been told that I had to join the same line as everyone else.

There was a line to get inside and then a second line once I got inside, followed by a THIRD line. I got to the front of the line after nearly two hours of waiting and showed the gentleman that I, Gordon Davidescu, had served jury duty and that there was no such person as Gonlon Davidescu. He looked through all of the papers and agreed that since I had done jury duty and there was no such person as Gonlon Davidescu, I did not have to serve jury duty again. Knowing that Gonlon was now marked as inactive in the voter registration records assured me that this was the last time I would ever hear or read the name Gonlon Davidescu.