Jury Duty - Day 3

It took one hour and fifteen minutes of riding connecting subways to get to the courthouse this morning for my 10 a.m. call time. I was 15 minutes late to the juror room and nobody noticed. As I was approaching the courthouse, the defense attorney on my assigned case walked past me in the opposite direction. I interpreted this as a sign that we weren't going to trial today. Around 1 p.m. they sent us home with a notice requesting our presence again on Monday the 17th.

I'm excited to be doing jury duty and I'm probably one of very few people who say that and mean it. It's my civic duty and I want to do it. I just don't want to sit around waiting to do it and that's what I've been doing. Waiting. And don't tell me that by my being there, I'm serving as a reminder to both plaintiff and defendant that this case is serious and that I may make a difference in terms of the final decision - because there's no trial yet. Nothing's happening. The case is scheduled but isn't moving up the calendar.

This presents a big problem for me. This week I am off until Friday night, when I start working again. But next week, I'm supposed to work a Wednesday matinee and there's a good chance the case is going to run over two days once it gets started. So now something that I was looking forward to doing, something I want to do because I believe in it, has become an enormous pain in the behind.