jury duty

Yea, verily. It has been many months since my last blog entry. Oh wait - you knew that.

Today I had jury duty. I am so incredibly spoiled that I found it onerous to 1) get woken up by an alarm 2) be constrained by the caltrain schedule (or, worse, drive during rush hour) 3) get up in the dark 4) get up earlier than I wanted to 5) not get enough sleep ...

We showed up. The woman in charge of the juror waiting room indoctrinated us, they played the "this is what it means to be a juror / it's a great legal system" video. We waited some more. They had wireless. I was close enough to hear all the questions jury-lady needed to answer.

Who are these people? Did they not just hear the information repeated 3 times in the previous 10 minutes? Do none of them have any sort of portable work? (I saw about 5 of us seemingly working out of about 40.) If all the people that can listen to instruction, read the information on the jury summons, etc. all get out of jury duty, except for 5 of us, how crappy is that?

My country and its laws. It's great. It's imperfect. It could be worse. It could be better.