Jury Duty!

Random thoughts as I sit here in the jury assembly room. It’s amazing to me how quickly my feelings dropped from excited to be part of the jury process to annoyed at the wait. I have no idea how long we’ll be here, and whether I, for the third time, will spend an entire day in this room, never being called to a court.

I have wanted to serve on a jury for years, if only to see what the whole process looks like from the inside. But each time I have been called, nothing happened. I believe the first time, I was a student at ucsc. Seeing as I was not a permanent resident of Santa Cruz, and seeing as I was called to serve on the grand jury, I fought for an excuse.

The second time was at the Alhambra Courthouse, where I spent an entire day waiting in a stuffy, boring courthouse. I was not called to serve, and I went home unfulfilled. The second time was in San Diego, where the exact same thing happened.

And now, today. It is about 10 a.m. and we have all been in this room since 7:30 a.m. In that time, we have heard two separate orientations (one welcome and one regarding the pieces of paper we were given), a welcome by a Judge Wiley, an call to drop off our jury paperwork, a break, then a call for the fools who failed to listen to ANY of the preceding instructions to fix their paperwork, and then…a video? I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to listen to the entire thing again, in Spanish. Oi.

Then again, maybe not, seeing as one of the questions on our form is whether you can understand English, so there is that.

It’s now 11:30 a.m. and the disembodied jury room voice ™ has now called two sets of jurors. I am not on either list. Honestly, I’m beginning to think this whole jury thing is a joke, a tremendous waste of time for everyone involved, notwithstanding the patriotic video shown.

Not only that, but you get such strange looks when you tell people that you really wanted to get on a jury, that you wanted to be involved in the judicial process. Everyone thinks you’re nuts, have a serious screw loose, or, perhaps, are just an incredibly boring person. But really, is there anything worse than spending the whole damn day in a room with a broken internet connection (no wireless, natch), old newspapers and mostly uncommunicative seat mates? It’s like being on an intercontinental flight: the food is bad, there’s nothing much to do, and it’s nearly impossible to sleep in the seats.

So, I have now been in the service of the county of Los Angeles for four hours, and I have done nothing. It’s pretty much like work, save for the fact that I don’t have the ability to check my email every few minutes. My cell phone gets no reception (T-Mobile users appear to be in the minority here, though… it seems pretty much everyone else can make calls at will).

11:53 a.m.
Whoo! I just got called to go to Dept. 68 on the sixth floor. I have, after two tries, finally made it to round two. Amazing. Now, let’s see how long it takes before I get kicked off. Whoo!