Part time job with full time pay

Process serving may be the perfect job for Scottsdale Community College students with little free time.

  

Chris Dennison is a process server for the Superior Court of Arizona. He wakes up early in the morning to make his three or four deliveries for the day. He has been given an address, a name, and a description of the person he is serving. The court tells him exactly what the person looks like whether he or she is tall, fat, skinny, brunette, blond, young, or old. He finds the address and hopes the individual answers the door.

  

When he is standing in front of the person, he must ask for an ID and then he can present the papers. He then files a certificate of service at the court and an officer of the court stamps it and keeps the original copy. After that is done, Dennison is finished working for the day. He has never had to work past 11 a.m. With the money he makes on his morning deliveries, he pays his mortgage on his house in Mesa.

  

But things do not always go so smoothly. Sometimes people do not answer their door at home or the office. “I’ve had to track people down at bars and sporting events,” Dennison said. “I have had to trick them into admitting who they are.”

  

“Sometimes I shout ‘Hey, Johnny’ just to see if they respond to their name,” Dennison explained. Dennison described a painful experience delivering divorce papers. “I delivered some divorce papers to a man and then he started crying. I felt so bad. I said that I was sorry, but he was just crying and I left feeling so bad the whole day.”

   

Sometimes people take their anger out on him. One woman backed her car up into his truck after he served her.

   

Valley resident Jan Jones knows what it is like to be on the receiving end of a process server. "Whenever I answer the door and someone says, 'Are you Jan Jones?' I say, 'Who wants to know?' I don't tell anyone who I am," Jones said.

  

Her brother, Scott Jones, told of an occasion when he was house sitting for a friend who was out of the country to avoid the process server. "I answered the door and it was a process server looking for the guy I was house sitting for. I told him he was out of the country. He decided to leave the papers with me instead, "Jones said. There is no avoiding the process server.

  

In order to become a process server, there is one long test at the courthouse that takes a few hours to complete, but after that there is no office time.