Mon 21 Aug 2006
It Would Have Been Cool…
Posted by Liza under Personal
I’m a civics geek. I love things like voting and the idea of jury duty. Today I got called for the 4th time, but I’ve never been picked.
I even made it into a specific pool today, as in 39 of my fellow citizens and I were escorted up to the elevator foyer outside of a courtroom where 12 of us would eventually be jurors in a real trial.
That’s where I blew it. Yup. In the elevator foyer.
When I first checked in downstairs, I told the nice woman at the window that I was a nursing mom and I would have to pump every 2.5-3 hours. She said, “no problem, come knock on the door here, we have a room you can use.”
90 minutes later, in the elevator foyer, I quietly said to the judge’s clerk, “I’m a nursing mom, and some time in the next 45 minutes, I’m going to need to pump, and then again every 2.5-3 hours after that.”
She identified my name on her clipboard and disappeared for 10 minutes, leaving all 40 of us standing in the elevator foyer, blocking traffic.
When she returned, she told me that I was dismissed from this panel and I should return to the jury management office and check in with them.
I did, then sat in their large storage closet and pumped. Then I hung around in the waiting area and read my book until 11:40, when they told us to go on a 15 minute break and get lunch. Then more reading. And more. And more. We were finally dismissed, thanks for doing your civic duty. I don’t know exactly when, because I couldn’t find my car in the parking lot, and wandered it for some horribly long and indefinite period of time. I got home and pumped again around 2.
I have to say, there’s something that sits funny with me that I was dismissed for needing to pump.
Of course, I almost certainly would have been dismissed for another reason anyway. (Conventional wisdom says that lawyers never get picked.) But still!
August 21st, 2006 at 7:35 pm
I would LOVE to serve on a jury. LOVE it. And since my employer (yes, still employed! For the next three weeks anyway!) pays 100% of the juror’s salary for whatever length of time the trial runs, I would have been able to do so with no financial hardship.
I’ve received a summons twice: first time was six years ago, when I was in the midst of an IVF cycle. I received a dismissal because I knew my egg retrieval would fall sometime during the week I was called — and, in fact, the E.R. ended up being the same day. The second time was when J. was a few weeks old. I was worried about pumping so called the court to explain I was a nursing mother — and received an automatic dismissal for 18(!!!) months.
Well, maybe I’ll get my chance again someday. Everyone thinks I’m a weirdo when I say I’d like to serve on a jury. It’s nice to see there are other freaks out there.
August 21st, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Sounds a lot like my day of jury duty. Except I was getting ready to load in Phantom and I wanted no part of sitting in a jury box.
Lucky for me, I never even had to talk to a judge. I spent the whole day in their waiting room. my group never got called.
One thing really got under my skin that day. At some point after lunch, they brought down the projection screens, turned off the lights, and started showing some banal extreme sports tv show (at volume 11). I had to ask permission to sit in the hallway so I could read my book in peace.
At what point did we as a race lose the ability to sit still without a moving picture in front of us?