Wow, so I got summoned for jury duty, anybody know how that works? They send you a letter and a crappy little questionnaire that you have to send back. Then they wait two weeks or so and send you a letter that says "just thought we'd remind you that we haven't bothered to tell you if you're actually needed for jury duty or not."
Then you have to call and the phone call tells you everything your need to know, should your "panel number" be requested. Except it doesn't really tell you everything. They let you guess at some of it.
Then there's the dress code. "Dress for a job interview." I'm in management. To me, that means wear a suit. However, upon arrival and seeing how everyone else was dressed, I remembered something. Construction workers don't wear suits to interviews. A significant portion of the potential jurors were wearing jeans and workboots with their preppy little oxfords.
Then we actually get there and we're left to sit a half hour, spoken to briefly, shown a video that looks like it belongs in a Jr. High Street Law class, given another crappy questionnaire and left to sit some more, while the initial prescreening of our paperwork happens.
Except that it didn't. It's now 10:20, a full 2 hours after I first arrived at the court house. The jury coordinator comes in at this point and proceeds to admit that while she thought it was strange that a judge who never does jury selection on Monday morning would want a jury at 8:30 Monday morning, apparently it didn't strike her as strange enough to actually check with the judge. She just took the clerk's word for it.
At this point, we're all thinking, thank god, they're going to send us home. If the judge doesn't like to start trials on Monday, that means they'll pick from the people who were summoned for tomorrow, right?
WRONG! That means go find something to do for 3 HOURS and come back at 1:45 for jury selection. Which will take not less than an hour and probably not more than an hour and a half to two hours.
So basically, I got up early, got dressed up, drove 10 blocks because I can't walk that far in dress shoes, parked in a crappy, poorly lit parking garage, walked 3 blocks to the court house (because the parking garage in just past 6th and Linden and the courthouse in at 4th and Hamilton), sat for two hours and then was dismissed for a long lunch and 5 more hours of wondering if I have to serve on a jury or not.
They'll only be picking 14 of the 45 of us, which is basically a 1 in 3 chance, which with my luck probably means that I'll get picked. Oh, and did I mention, I"m not missing work for this, I'm on vacation! Because my manager didn't tell me that the company does jury duty pay and I can't afford to only get paid the piddly $9/day that they pay jurors in order to fairly compensate us for fulfilling our civic duty.
Way to pick an impartial jury! Piss everybody off, then ask us to decide someone's fate. Because this if for a criminal trial, which could last anywhere between 4 hours and 3 days.
I can't believe that there's no better way to do this. Phone interviews or something. I mean they plan the docket ahead of time. Somebody had to know that there was no trial today. Oh, wait, the judge did know that. Apparently it was just the woman in charge of when the jury actually had to be there who didn't bother to find out.
But I'm not angry or anything. Not me. I enjoy it when bureaucratic red tape destroys my vacation. That's my big thrill in life.
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