Jury Duty
I seen my duty and I done it.
Apologies to George Washington Plunket or whoever actually said that.
Ok, so I got up at 5:45 and left home at what the Jury Waiting Room Maven called O dark hundred. (I know. She borrowed it from the military. Still it was better than I expected from a moderately civil servant)
We were checked for weapons upon entering and sent into the Jury Waiting Room.
Within an hour about twenty of our names were read from among the hundred or so sitting there. Up to jury room 23 we trooped in quiet strangerlyness. All the seats in the hall were already taken by some other, other group. They must have been left over or something or part of an already functioning jury group. In ten minutes we were told they certainly didn’t need that many people and to go back where we came from. No one was rebellious enough to just go home so we all went back to the Jury Waiting Room and sat. And sat. At lunch break I went to the cafeteria and got a hamburger and fries which while not good or tasty was (were?) filling to the point of repugnancy. I also got and drank a drink of what purported to be a fairly well known colorless liquid which tasted not so much like dew as don’t. I was pretty thirsty and I drank it but it smelled like a well known solvent used to clean rifle barrels. (Or perhaps the spouts of drink dispensers)
Then we went back into the big room and sat. After a while, four hours, I watched with a numb rump, a representative of the state walk to the lectern and open her mouth. I thought what a “bummer” it would be if we got called to duty with just one more hour to go and our hope rising as the time diminished. She excused us and we arose and clogged the exit and hall in our grimly casual flight. No one was hurt but we weren’t waiting around to see if they had made a mistake.
We headed for our cars and then sat idling in enormous lines trying to get out on the street. Thirty minutes later and blessing the Prius’s gas mileage in a condition of idle (The damn thing gets 99.99 miles to the gallon when sitting at a light. I bet if you sat there long enough the tank would overflow) I hit the main street and headed for freedom. Twenty minutes later, having been unable to get over three lanes of more knowledgeable “local” happy non-jurors to the on ramp to “Home” I made an illegal U turn somewhere near the pacific ocean, headed back up the street and made it onto the freeway behind others who had been just as unable as I, all of us still in remarkably good humor. There is nothing so delightful as being willing but not having to do your duty.