Jury Duty Can Suck My Civic Balls

Readership, once you turn 18, your name goes on a couple lists (at least in America). If you don't have a job, it goes on the State Unemployment list. If you have your license, it goes on the State DMV license registry. If you register to vote in your state, it goes on the State Registered Voters list. If you filed taxes in your state last tax season, you go on the Paying Taxes to *whatever state* list.

From these four lists, names are drawn randomly by computer, and if yours comes up, you're in for a treat. A treat dripping in as much sarcasm as the previous sentence.

Yup, you guessed it. Jury duty.

Jury duty, as the video they show you explains, is an honor. It is your civic duty as a proud citizen of your state to be selected to a jury of your fellow state residents so you can uphold another fellow citizen's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial by a jury of his or her peers.

Fuck jury duty.

I woke up at around 7 this morning so I could be ready to leave by 7:45. I got to the courthouse at 8, still half-asleep. After going through a metal detector and up an elevator to the top floor, myself and about fifty other people were confined to what looked like a fucked up lecture hall with chairs in rows that didn't separate. There was a 32-inch television on one of those elementary-school-esque carts against the back wall, next to the podium, and it was perpetually tuned to CNN.

We're going to stop here for a moment. There was recently a REALLY bad earthquake in Haiti. Like REALLY REALLY bad. There have been a lot of deaths, and there are thousands of people still unaccounted for, even now at the moment that I'm typing this. CNN was reporting on the earthquake all day. So as if it wasn't bad enough that I was stuck in this fucking room with a bunch of strangers (and not a few creepy old guys), I was smacked in the face with a tragedy that genuinely saddened me, because my roommate and good friend Waldy has family down there, that when I last asked him, hadn't been accounted for.

To top it all off, some dickhead with a SmartBoard came on the screen, and used it to tell the viewers that 47% of Haiti's citizens lived in Port-au-Prince (which was the earthquake's epicenter), and also that Haiti had a 53% literacy rate.

Why the fuck was that important? I wondered, did he perhaps think that the earthquake had given the Haitian people an ultimatum before it struck - "READ ROMEO AND JULIET OR I'LL CRUSH YOU!" - and thus this statistic was relevant? Somehow I think not.

I digress.

All of this depressing and makin'-me-mad shit ceased for about five minutes, when this late-fifties Hispanic guy got on the podium. He had a sexy Telemundo voice, but spoke English (obviously), and spoke like a pilot. Everything was enunciated and pronounced super clearly and the cadence was fake as hell and I wanted to shoot him. I couldn't even pay attention to what he was saying because his voice pissed me off so damn much.

When he stopped, we got a "coffee break." The coffee was completely gone after everybody had some. And it wasn't even good coffee.

After the "coffee break," at around 10, they sat us back in the auditorium/lecture hall/torture chamber.

And we sat.

And we sat.

And I listened to Aesop Rock.

And we sat.

And this creepy lady dressed all in black who seemed to have went to Goku's stylist to get her hair done stood up against a pillar twenty feet behind me and stared at me for an hour or so.

And we sat.

Finally, at around noon, an announcement came over hidden speakers saying that we were free to go.

I SPENT FOUR FUCKING HOURS OF MY MORNING SITTING WATCHING DEPRESSING CNN AND DRINKING BAD COFFEE WHILE BEING STARED AT BY CREEPY MEN AND WOMEN.

And I got paid something to the tune of 10 bucks.

Fuck jury duty.

Stay classy