Jury Duty is the first thing that has made me worry about getting out of the house on time in a long, long while. I pulled into the parking lot and was grateful that I had cash left over from the shopping spree at Canton, where I paid for Bitmap and her collar and spent $120 on a new rear tire at Walmart. Expensive day. Anyway, I parked my truck and the first thing I heard was two young women, dressed in trash, badly bleached hair and cigarettes hanging, complaining about having to be there.
"The only people who serve on juries are the ones too stupid to get out of it," I thought. The women only proved the point.
The room was already very crowded as I approached. Having passed the metal detector's scan, filled out a form and located the right paperwork for the day, I moved down the aisle wondering why there were so many single seats available in the middle of rows. And why there were so many people standing around the edges of the room.
I promptly made two people get up so I could squeeze past for a seat.
We may have learned raising our hands and passing our papers to the end of the row in kindergarden, but we apparently failed in the etiquette of moving to the center so everyone could have a seat.
The video was pretty useful, the announcements began to get redundant, the survey was a .20 second break from the monotony and the woman who actually called us up and sent us on our way was darn-right impossible to take. She spoke so condiscendingly, and at the same time slowly, as to make me wish I were about to have a dire emergency.
I did get sent to the 5th floor. Sat for about an hour. Then got released by a Baliff who's clearly also been doing his job too long. He was long winded, said nearly nothing useful, repeated himself a lot and then basically threw the juror-tag collection box on the floor and told us to go home.
On the way down the elevator I realized that I could tell the defendents and their families from the jurors. I could also tell those who worked at the courthouse from those of us who were there only temporarily. And finally, though I was bummed because I actually enjoy the trial process and believe in jury service, I was glad to be gone. I'm apparently as dumb as everyone else who goes to the jury call.'
At least that's the way the whole morning felt... and sounded.