Jury rigged

So what's jury duty like, precious?

Well. You drive downtown through all the decaying urban landscapes that ring Louisville's riverside downtown district like an asteroid belt made up of destroyed human lives. You embark on the never ending quest for a parking space. Eventually you either find one or you kill yourself. You are not helped in your endeavor by capitalism, which has decreed that all parking in downtown Louisville is run by private enterprise and private enterprise donates not a single fucking square inch of space to the ancient and honorable tradition of jury duty.

Assuming you eventually find a spot (which you will pay between 8 and 12 bucks a day for, leaving between four fifty to fifty cents of your allotted jury duty daily pay for lunch or other expenses), you hike back to the Justice Building, go in through the metal detectors, go up one flight to the jury room. This is a huge room full of uncomfortable chairs that nonetheless quickly becomes packed because apparently there are hundreds of people, just like you, who are either too stupid to get out of jury duty or who are lucky enough to have employers that pay them for jury duty and so who see it as the lesser of two evils (the greater of which is pretty much any job any of us have ever held).

And then you sit there, for half an hour, forty five minutes, until some elderly fellow with defeated eyes shuffles in with a cordless mike in his hand and says "Okay, let's get started."

He then makes a tired joke about how apparently we all got our Publisher's Clearing House Award notifications. People laugh. The guy sitting next to you, who has already told you that he did jury duty once before twenty years ago, whispers to you that they opened with the same joke back in 1997. Ah, yes, Publisher's Clearing House and THE SIMPSONS, the two constants of American pop culture over the last generation.

The elderly fellow then tells everyone to get up and get into two lines, A-M and N-Z. You feel fortunate your last name starts with M when you notice that that the N - Z line is four times as long as A through M. Which makes you think "Maybe they should do it A - Se and Si through Z". It won't be the first such thought you have today.

You go through the line. They give each person in line back the bottom half of the jury duty form that all of them mailed back in three weeks before this, which now has a cardboard rectangle on it that has your juror number lettered on it in magic marker, along with the phone number you will call every night to find out if you have to report the next day, until such time as your term ends or you get selected for a panel.

A Deputy Sheriff gets up and tells you a lot of nonsense about how jurors are the most important part of the system and you should wear your badge inside the courthouse at all times because people will see it and get out of your way and be generally more respectful to you. You suspect this is horseshit; he confirms this by advising that also, it IDs you to lawyers and other court personnel, who are not allowed to talk to you.

Then it's time for everyone to get in line and shuffle around again, this time to have the bar code on your jury duty papers scanned to confirm your attendance. When you get up to the lady this time -- same one you just saw half an hour ago -- you venture to ask "Why didn't you just scan all these when we came through the first time?" The dead, joyless cavity that living in America for 55 years has eaten in your soul is not surprised when she stares at you as if you are a crazy man, and then shrugs and says "I don't know, this is just how we do it".

These questions keep nagging at you. Why isn't this done online? Sure, some people still aren't wired, but most people are, and if all this paperwork was filled out online, it could be processed instantly, badges could be printed out and mailed out, there could be automatic U Scans set up so everyone could badge in when they arrived.

For that matter, why don't parking garages have a little electronic board when you drive in that tells you which parking spaces are still open? This can't be expensive technology.

You hear the woman's bovine voice again in your mind -- "I don't know. This is just how we do it."

You wonder how many people in this room voted for Trump... or would have, if they could have managed to find their polling place.

You sit down again. You wait a while longer, intermittently reading THE VALLEY OF HORSES, occasionally talking to the guy beside you and the elderly retired school teacher beside him. Neither of them have any sense of humor, as far as you can tell.

They show you a short firm on the thrilling juror experience. Two judges come down and thank you for doing your civic duty and exhort you to be the best juror you can, both repeating and stressing that you are only supposed to decide your verdict based on what is presented to you in court. You are not supposed to do research. You are not supposed to do your own investigation. You must only consider what the judge allows the lawyers to present. You sit there, keeping your face blank as they say this, but wondering if they truly believe that it's best to keep jurors utterly ignorant of everything about a case except what the judge rules is acceptable by the laws of jurisprudence. This seems rather a flaw in the system to you. But, whatever.

Eventually, they call forty numbers at random. These are the jurors that have to hang out, to fill up two panels for today's trials. Your number isn't called, so you get to go home.

This is not exactly the way you expected it to be from all those LAW AND ORDER episodes.

Still, it is... marginally... better than work.

And tomorrow, according to the tape you just listened to, you get to go back again. * * * *

I first published this account of my first day of jury duty a year ago, on June 5, 2017. Let me add a few things that occurred during or because of my jury duty afterwards -- * At some point a few days after this, the combination of going up and down stairs in the parking garage and in the government building itself, plus sitting on those incredibly uncomfortable chairs for hours at a time, fucked my back over righteously. I had to sleep in a recliner for two nights until I finally managed to get a doctor's appointment. She gave me some muscle relaxers, which allowed me to sleep in a bed. I spent most of this time worried that I'd permanently disabled myself, but eventually my back got better. This was my first experience with what people call 'throwing their back out', or at least, it was my first one that was this severe, and I hope to God it's my last. * Halfway through my jury duty, I was informed by the Frank Burns supervisor at the job I held back then (I no longer work there) that I'd need to show him paperwork proving I was actually being called for jury duty on the days I was calling in. Now, prior to my jury duty starting, I'd shown my summons form to six different supervisors at my job and none of them had had a problem, but oh no, this dick needed me to provide additional paperwork. (The policy said 'you MAY be asked to furnish proof of jury duty on certain days'. Meaning it's not necessary, unless your supervisor is a shitbag, which mine was. And, I imagine, still is, but I don't have to deal with him any more, so hurray for that.) All this happened after a different supervisor, who is one of the ones I'd already shown my paperwork to, started questioning me about exactly how long it took me every day to report and whether I was really there all day. I asserted that I was, but I resented the questioning, because I'm here to tell you, even if I maybe wasn't there until the end of my shift, if you think I'm getting up in the morning, getting dressed for jury duty, driving downtown and going through all the shit I detailed above, and then, if I get sent home early, driving to work to finish up my shift, you are too fucking stupid to be allowed outside in naturally occurring weather. The paperwork that the government prints out for you in case you have a shitty snoopy employer like I did at the time simply shows the days you were called in, not the times you were actually there or when they let you go. So I got that printed out for me and turned it in and FUCK YOU, ASSHOLES. Yeah, I got over on you for a few paid half days off. Maybe if the job didn't suck so hard and the people who ran it weren't such douchebags, I'd have come in to work. * I never did get selected to be a juror. I did, however, have an experience where I saw an empty space in a parking garage and swooped my car into it without really considering that the reason the space was empty was that it was almost impossible to get back out of it, as it was over by a wall in a very cramped area of the building. I finally got a stranger to help me by spotting me as I backed out to make sure I didn't hit anyone's car, but the room I had to maneuver was measurable in centimeters -- not many of them. You live and learn. Overall, jury duty wasn't a particularly great time. I can't recommend it. I now see why people try so hard to get out of it. Although it is, marginally, better than spending the time at work, except for the fact that it causes you to have otherwise unnecessary interactions with douchebag supervisors.