Jury Duty

Jury Duty can be described as a commentary on society. I tend to forget how ridiculous people are when I haven't been outside my little cross-section of the world in a while. Major reality check on that one on Friday, as well as an interesting peak into our judicial system. To start I have to say that while I agree with the inconvenience of the whole jury duty thing I have a difficult time buying into the idea that my time is more important than the possible future of the person that is on trial and so I just can't blow off jury duty as many people can. Call me naive, but it is who I am. While I recognize the flaws in the system (it's pretty hard to miss while you are sitting in a room for 8 hours on a workday), I also honestly think that we've got about the best system I've seen and so if I'm not willing to be part of a jury then I'm not really willing to be part of the society that at this age I've chosen to be part of (kind of the same way I feel about voting - responsibility of being a member of this society people, get your butt in gear and deal with the fact that with rights comes responsibilities).

Ok, back off my soap box. Anyway, within 15 minutes of sitting in the room at the courthouse I realized that it was going to be one of those days where I needed to look very very hard for the positive aspects of the situation or I was going to drive myself crazy with frustration. So, I took out my book and started reading, accepted the fact that I was going to have to write off that day, and figured once we finally started I would simply take it as a day to note interesting things about society and people in general for purposes of my blog. Thus, I give you my thoughts below, in no particular order...

1) I can see why it takes 3 years to get a case through the system - it's insanely inefficient. At least from the perspective of the person called for jury duty. I'm certain that the attorneys who apparently knew they didn't need to get there at 9:00am as we were instructed to do had a fine morning. However, it would have been nice if they had told me I didn't really have to get there until 9:30 at the earliest because they were going to wait for all the late people anyway. Second, it would be ideal if instead of having each of us stand and say our name, our age, our occupation and our spouses occupation they would have just read all that information and more on the 9 page form I had to fill out and send back. But then why would we bother them with such silly things as actually using the information that I was requested to provide? After an entire day of people being asked questions (which by the way had they asked each person those questions personally rather than in a group of 150 people I could have been done in 10 minutes because I didnt have the need to explain how I was really busy, or that my husbands business does such and such, or that for this reason on that I should be excused) I was set free at 2:30. Not sure what was accomplished by my sitting there, but such is life.

2) People are fascinating. Some might say annoying, but since I had to make myself look on the bright side I went with fascinating throughout the day. Just looking at the attorneys was in itself interesting. Each of them you could see had a very specific way of noting information while they were listening to the intros, they had specific books in front of them, and each one was different on how the laid them out. Not that it was surprising, but a lot of times you don't see how different people are as obviously.

3) Then there were the jurors...oh, good Lord. I have to say one thing that I really cannot stand is people who think that their time is more valuable than yours. This can come in a number of different ways, but on Friday I noticed it with the people who just couldnt' shut up about how this was inconvenient. Really? You think there is anyone in the room who found it convenient to take off work and sit in a room accomplishing nothing all day? Well perhaps the people who I felt bad for when they had to announce to the entire room that they were unemployed (yikes, talk about an uncomfortable intro) - but then again, perhaps they had some job searching to do, you never know. Which is exactly my point, you never know what is going on in people's lives, which means you shouldn't assume that whatever is going on in yours is more important. There was one woman who when she was supposed to say her name and age launched into how she couldn't stay for jury duty because she was too busy. And then she stood up multiple times throughout the day to announce again how busy she was and wanted to be excused.

4) The use of humor as a social tool was also pretty interesting. It just pointed out how different people are when you would have someone cracking jokes during their 30 second intro, after someone who was very serious and answered only the questions listed, after someone who rambled on about info very unnecessary, but that they thought was important to throw out there, like how many years they were married, what their company does, how it's important to buy local goods (yeah, that lady actually had the balif make fun of her, who up until that point was doing a very good job not making fun of anyone).

5) People have strange jobs. My favorite was self employed geologist. Really? Isn't that just a fancy way to say unemployed? Overall it seemed like the largest subsections of jobs were people that work for MUSC (the medical university in Charleston) or were teachers.

I'll head back on Tuesday for more interviews, and then I guess we'll see if I get picked for the jury. So far I've done pretty good making myself pay attention to what makes the situation entertaining rather than frustrating, we'll see if my powers of self control can continue...