Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Jury duty
There must have been at least two hundred of us in the room. We were instructed to report to the courthouse at 8:15 AM, but they didn’t even get to the opening spiel until 9:30. The bailiff who gave the spiel fancied himself a stand-up, and really, he wasn’t half bad. But what are you going to do with 200+ people who aren’t really happy to be there?
At 10:00, he read off the randomly selected names in alphabetical order. Now, I think he should have read them in random order, just to heighten the torture. But the way he did it, those of us with 3rd grade or better education knew precisely when we were off the hook. The rest remained anxious to the end.
Interesting how some folks took it in stride while others cursed. Mostly I just waited, anxiously, until the bailiff had passed by us HOs. (And you know how much a HO likes being in a courthouse. Just sayin’.) Roughly forty of the two hundred of us marched off to face voir dire, while the rest were instructed to sit. And sit. And watch the news, or Rachael Rae, or (after lunch) Criminal Intent, or Family Feud.
I had a book. I brought Markos Moulitsas’s American Taliban, which is good, but I can’t get as absorbed in nonfiction as I do in fiction. So during our two-hour lunch break I drove home to pick up my eBook reader. I finished the second Hunger Games book today, and I must say, Collins managed to surprise me a few times. And it wasn’t as big a letdown as middle books in a trilogy generally are. And she only had one minor plot fuck-up toward the end. All in all, good work.
The funny bailiff read off another list of names at 2:30 PM, this one somewhat shorter, maybe 30 names. And he was back again at 3:20. We all cursed. We were so close — we knew we would be discharged, free as birds, at 4:00! But he only came back to tell us we were discharged a little earlier than planned. Free to go for another year.
So all in all not as much fun as I had the LAST time I was stuck in the juror pool. Followup to that old post: I found out that I was tossed because of my views on child endangerment. My patient, who was a friend of this judge, told me that by stating my views so forcefully, I had come close to disqualifying the entire juror pool!
That’ll teach ’em to bother a doctor.
Anyway, thank heavens they didn’t pick me today. Now I can go back to work and do what I do best: eat pork rinds for lunch while I speed-surf the ‘net.
D.
I’d love to server jury duty. The one time my number came up, I didn’t even have to appear and I was really bummed.
“And what do you do for a living, Mrs. Jones?”
“Oh, I come up with many new and different ways for serial killers to slaughter innocents — the more sadistic, the better!”
“You’re excused, Ms. Jones.”
Nah, I’m a housewife. If pressed, I make quilts and write a little prose. I’m a political moderate. I have too many pets.
Just because my books are sadistic does not mean I am. I’m really pretty white-bread boring.
Ah, but you channel Mr. Hyde so well . . .