Jury Duty

I've been off the past three days, on jury duty. As days go, it was okay.

We sat for 2.5 days. Two panels were called. A jury was seated from the first one, and the second, that I was on, was dismissed without having a jury selected. Apparently, in our case, the guy plead guilty before we could be selected.

There were two people there that I knew from church, which is somewhat unlikely, considering that's two out of 150+ jurors, and I know maybe 150 people at church out of 450,000 people in the county.

My fellow jurors were a hoot. I heard pretty much constant complaining in the conversations going on around me, for the whole duration. Apart from the complainers, the whole experience wasn't that bad, although yesterday afternoon was a bit noisy.

I could have taken a laptop with me and worked, but decided against it, as they would have made me leave such laptop in the juror area, had I been called for a panel. I wouldn't have wanted to do that with my own machine, so decided against it with my work machine, and just worked in the evenings to make up time.

The two court workers in the jury area, Lillie and Rita, were terrific. Thinking about it, they spend their work life dealing with people who, as I said, largely don't want to be there, and complain about it at every chance. But they did so with a good sense of humor and a good bit more understanding than I had at the end of even day 2.

I did this about 6 years ago, and rumor has it that I'm now off the hook for at least 3 years from now.

Now then, where was I?