Reactionary

I’m tired of having one of those days. After a brutal weekend, I was exhausted yet I still had to get up early to go to federal court for jury duty. I valued my extra half an hour of sleep rather than breakfast, anyway they’d fed us at the city court I had been to in the spring so I figured it would be the same. Wrong. They had a room that sold food that was little more than a human vending machine run by blind people and of course you had to pay for everything you consumed. It wouldn’t have killed then to have some coffee for us or something.

The jury assembly room itself was modern with big windows and much better than the city court’s room that smelled like mildew, but the chairs were so close together that it was just a step above sitting on each others’ laps. My knees were almost hitting the chair in front of me. I was exhausted but in that cramped position, forget about sleeping.

The staff also did very little to make us feel at ease and there were numerous reminders that it was our “civic duty” that went with our citizenship. They admitted to taking our names from the voter registration logs. That’s it. I’m never voting again. The woman in charge had a voice most like a robot that I have ever heard. Maybe she was doing it on purpose. Maybe not. It was bordering on freakish… scratch the “bordering on”. It was over the other side and in the heartland of freakish. She’s the one who does the recorded message for people to call on the phone line the night before. I always thought it was a machine’s voice. She sounds more computerish than my Mac.

They picked two panels. I’d taken Michener’s Mexico which I have vowed to finish in spite of it being so self-important, plodding, and self-referential. I read during the breaks. They picked one panel of 20, then another of 30+ and then we waited and waited, for almost an hour. It was such a grey day that the buildings on the other side of the street were barely visible. Imagine how painful it would have been if sunny. I wallowed in self-pity for my 18 hours of overtime and determined I’d get a video iPod after all this was over. I love my nano but it doesn’t play video and can’t be used as a receptacle for photographs when on the road. I thought of that as I tried to speed-read through the last 300 pages of this painful book. It’s a shame because if it had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. I overheard bits of conversation, people talking about how they’d gotten there that day, their kids, the local football team. Imagine how furious I’d be if I had had to come from Lancaster for this? I only had to jump on the subway for 5 minutes and walk a block in the rain to get there, even if it was my one and only day off. I tried not to think of a mob trial or ugly malpractice suits.

About 20 minutes after they’d left a few of the people picked in the panels came back to the room. They were the rejected ones. It wasn’t long after that Robot Lady announced there was good news and bad news. The cases were settled and jurors no longer needed. We could go home and count our jury service as done, not like last time when I just hadn’t had to show up but I wasn’t considered done.

Ecstatic, even though it means I have to go to work tomorrow. I was out of danger of being picked for trial or trying to come up with 50 ways to NOT get picked. That freaks me out. I watch too much TV of what happens to people who end up on the wrong juries. Imagine having to go to Allentown to hear a case. Thank God. I picked up my work excuse even though I won’t need it as this was on my own time. I get to keep the $40 they’re paying me.

In drizzling rain, I decided to skip lunch at my favorite restaurant, passed the DMV (too bad I didn’t have my photo form with me, it would have been nice to get that done), and finally stopped inside Tower Records who is going out of business and selling everything at 30-50% off. I came to a realization. The DVDs are still too expensive. This is why they’re going out of business. Even on sale, stupid movies I’ll get tired of watching were going for about $15. And who needs cases anyway? They take up so much room and gather so much dust. I got the Seinfeld I don’t have (Season 6) just because it’s the only thing I can see myself watching over and over.

And then… I blame my not having my phone. I didn’t take my phone because at the city court, cell phones are banned from entry. If I’d had my phone, I would have called family on suggestions for Christmas gifts like another girl at Tower was doing. I would have gotten distracted and that would have been that. Instead, I went first to one Apple reseller looking for an iPod but they didn’t sell refurbished and then I went to another one… this is the result:

Posted on November 13th, 2006 under Life, Tech •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback