The 12 of us sat in locked room. We could not leave without escort. We could not ask questions unless one of us, designated as communicator, wrote them on forms, folded the form in half, knocked on a door, and passed them to a middleman who delivered them to a decision-maker.
…what is this torture? Who put me in this position!?
How about THAT in medias res shit, eh? This is like a real piece of writing, not just a tossed-off thing I do to make a cool $30 bucks annually.
I’m not normally big on stories that start mid-action. It’s become a very popular way to tell a story, and I blame Pulp Fiction for making people think that you can take a pretty boring story, jumble it up, and that makes it a good story. Which isn’t to say I think Pulp Fiction is a bad story, but to say that people took the wrong idea away from it, as we do with most movies.
People watched Fight Club and thought that nobody was a unique snowflake (except for them), people watched The Matrix and assumed they were secretly super special (but they were the only ones), and people watched Obsession and took away that it was a good, original movie rather than, well
The whole reordering of events in a story is just a trick to make your crappy story seem a lot more exciting than it is, which, to be fair, is how you define the job of “writer”: take a thing that happened (or didn’t happen) and make it sound interesting.
The big problem with starting in the middle of the action is that you set up a situation where a brake pump is a couple turns away. There’s very little that starts with a lot of action, or maybe starts in the messy aftermath of the action, and doesn’t then have to stop, reset, and bring us way, way back to the place in the story where the boring setup stuff happened. It’s just undelayed gratification, or maybe I should say delayed frustration.
However, this is what I’ve done to myself, so here we go.
My two-fisted, thrill-a-minute tale of jury duty begins with my hemorrhoidectomy surgery. Well, just before surgery.
Because the last 12 months have been, easily, the worst year of my entire life, I received a jury duty notice in the mail telling me to report about 2 weeks after my hemorrhoidectomy.
This was my first big opportunity to tell someone, loud and proud, that some dude was going to cut open my asshole, strip out some tissue, and it’d be difficult for me to sit down for hours at a time.
I’ve designed this ribbon for hemorrhoidectomy awareness. It’s meant to represent toilet paper going from the bright red of blood to the dark brown of shit. Do you like it? You shouldn’t, it’s disgusting.
I got a deferment while I recovered from surgery. Which is what I asked for, but not what I really asked for.
Something I picked up working in a library is that people often ask for something, but they really want something else. Someone might ask for a “romance” when what they really want is some serious BDSM erotica with giant werewolves who seem to be taking werewolf growth hormone to get swole.
Someone might ask you to help them with their website when what they really want is for you to just build a website for them, a task you might consider, but DON’T DO IT. Trust me, if this person doesn’t really understand how web design works, they are a short jump from asking you to do impossible things like making a disco ball drop down when the 1,000th customer hits the site and to then have that 1000th customer’s printer spit out a gift card for 1,000 cents.
When I asked for deferment due to hemorrhoidectomy surgery, what I really asked for was to never have jury duty, ever.
I’m a believer that jury duty should be something you shouldn’t have to do under certain circumstances or if you meet certain criteria. For example, if you have an extremely painful surgery on your butthole, you’ve had enough pain in your life and should get out of jury duty. Just to use a hypothetical.
If your child dies between the ages of 5 and 15, that seems like a reasonable, permanent excusal. Life has jerked you around enough.
If you’re in a wheelchair, fuck it, you shouldn’t have to come in. Unless you’re one of those wheelchair athletes who are probably the most annoying people in the world to other people in wheelchairs. If you can race 10K in your wheelchair, I reckon you can go ahead and come on in. You’ve got a zest for life, and part of taking the zest is getting a little pith sometimes.
If you have a terminal illness, you shouldn’t have to waste what’s left of your life in a courtroom unless you’re in there suing someone who invented some quacky, alternative medicine practice that made your situation even worse.
There’s probably one person out there slobbering to hear that veterans should be excused. Sorry, fuckers. Maybe movie theaters don’t have the guts to say it, but I will: Some of you are genuine heroes, some of you fucked up real bad in high school and didn’t have a lot of options. I knew a guy who went into the military because he was working at a gas station and giving away free propane, for YEARS, and his boss gave him the option of criminal charges or joining the military. He returned with tales of braving some of the oddball sex work practices of some of the world’s other lands. Navy: Avoid Jail, See The World, And Have The Option To Stick Your Dick In Parts Of It.
No offense, I know some of you did some real shit work. Some of you probably should be excused, but I’m not 100% sure how to weed out the ones who did stuff and the ones who honestly didn’t face a lot more danger than I did cleaning a toilet at the public library.
I got my jury duty put off, but they were happy to take me post-surgery, the moment I was ready to, as one person in the jury waiting room put it, “Serve my country.” We’ll get to him…
If you’ve never done jury duty before, let me be the first to tell you that it’s nothing like TV. And by that I don’t mean that it’s less dramatic or less fascinating in the courtroom and everyone is less good looking, although all of those things are true.
What they don’t show on TV is that jury duty is basically like going to the airport, but involuntarily and with no destination awaiting you.
And, if you went to the airport, through security, waited for a plane, and then turned around and went home without boarding, you’d be pissed. With jury duty, that’s the best possible outcome.
It begins, as all government things do, with a line. In this case, a line to walk through a metal detector.
And this is where my anger begins because, guys, there are people who work in the courthouse every day. This is their career. They can spend YEARS working this metal detector/X-ray machine station, but it never occurs to maybe fix the waiting room for the X-ray machine.
Everyone shows up at about the same time, which means there’s a line for the metal detector, which ends up going all the way outdoors. Which means someone is holding the door open all the time because there’s only a very small vestibule between the front doors and the x-ray.
In winter, the last time I did jury duty, this means an employee is constantly telling everyone to let the door close because they’re letting the heat out, and when you step inside, you look a fellow person in the face as you let the door shut them outside in the cold. In summer, it means telling everyone to let the door close because they’re letting the cool air out, and you let the door close on an elderly woman who would probably perish in the heat if it wasn’t for the miracle of air conditioning.
Then you walk through a metal detector, which is pretty silly for jurors. I get it for people just visiting the courtroom, but those of us called against our will for jury duty, COMPELLED to be there? If we were angry, wouldn’t we, instead of bringing in a weapon, just stay home? Can you imagine being so upset that you decide to do something destructive in court, but you wait for jury duty to come around to actually do it? Who are these patient-but-violent weirdos?
After you wait in the post-metal-detector line, you wait in another line to turn in your homework, the form that was mailed to you, and you get another paper to fill out, mostly questions that are identical to the ones on the form you just filled out and turned in. Which is information the court already has because they sent the summons to your house, so it seems fair to assume they already know your address. If you sent a thing to my address, and I brought that thing in, wouldn’t it be fair to figure we’re all working from the same address here?
There was a thing we used to do at the library where, if you didn’t have an ID, we’d send a postcard to your house. If you told us an address, we wrote it down on a postcard, mailed it out, and then if you brought that postcard back, it was proof you lived where you said you lived.
The forms also ask what your spouse does, which is weird. I guess they want to find out if you’re married to a cop, but…I don’t JUST want to smacktalk cops here, and I think it’s fair to say they probably wouldn’t mind me speculating that some of them have had sex with people they weren’t married to. It would be fun for me to imagine that lots of cops are hopeless virgins, but I don’t want to be harassed by police, so you’re all bigtime sex machines, okay? I think you’re great and get laid all the time.
They give you far too long for the paperwork and then ask if everyone is finished, and there’s always the one guy who is not quite done. Which, let’s excuse that guy from service. This is clearly the guy we remember from school, the one who is taking goddamn forever on the test, the one we all know doesn’t know anything about the Teapot Dome Scandal and is just seated with a pencil in his mouth, hoping that by chewing it the chemicals from the Ticonderoga factory might enter his brain and bridge the gap between two neurons, miraculously allowing him to remember something about Warren G. Harding that he never knew in the first place.
We don’t need that guy on the jury. We don’t.
Which brings me to…
A Jury of my Peers
I am not someone with high self-esteem, but I do think there are people who show up to jury duty who are NOT my peers.
This isn’t necessarily a judgment, there are people who are above me and people who are beneath me in every possible category. People smarter than me, and true dummies. People hotter than me, and people who challenge the concept of a just god, because what reasonable deity would make a person uglier than me?
I might include in this grouping of people I don’t consider peers:
The man who, after we were all told we’d need to return the next day, stood up and shouted, “I can’t come back here, I have to work tomorrow,” as though nobody else had considered this possibility and his situation was unique.
The woman who, after giving many bonkers answers to questions during jury selection, was dismissed, and then stood up and looked around the room with an expression on her face of utter confusion and hurt, like she couldn’t fathom that attorneys listened to the crazy bullshit she said and decided, “No thanks.”
The guy who, during a time we were told to leave for lunch, I saw sitting in his truck, in a 2-hour parking spot, a solid 4 hours after we showed up that morning. This after repeated, non-stop warnings about where to park, not to mention the jury summons is about 20% devoted to parking information.
The guy who said he was hoping to “have the chance to serve my country” by being on a jury.
The guy who was hitting on a female juror by asking about where she grew up and being very relieved they did not go to rival high schools.
To be honest with you, Guys 3 through 5 are the same guy. That’s one dude. He can definitely go home.
I think it’d be fair if, should someone be on trial, they get to come up with a short list of screening questions that help determine whether someone is their peer, or at least peer-adjacent.
Which is why I’ve made a set of questions that I think would be fair to ask potential jurors.
Keep in mind, you don’t have to 100% ace this, just be reasonably close to a decent score. 51% or better?
Also, none of these questions are related to crimes. Crimes against my personal sense of right and wrong, sure, but not convictable offenses:
How many books have you read in the last year (I’ll accept any number greater than or equal to .35)?
What would be a likely downside of getting a home loan that requires no money down (I’ve been watching some House Hunters, and lots of people seem to think this is a fabulous idea, basically free money)?
If your mailbox was not directly attached to your house, but instead you had to check your mail at a building that was less than 50 yards from your house, would you drive to this building, or would you walk to it?
When you leave the house, do you get in your car and do whatever you need to with your phone while you sit in the driveway, or do you drive to the end of your street and then stop for a minute or two and futz with your phone, then become angry if someone pulls up behind you and honks?
What is the longest Chik-fil-A line you’ve ever waited in willingly?
If you walked into a non-necessities shop that asked you to wear a mask, would you:
A: Wear a mask if you had one or one was provided
B: Leave without entering the shop
C: Defiantly walk into the shop while refusing to wear a mask
D: Any of the above and then make a TikTok about how annoyed you were?How open are you to the possibility that the government adds fluoride to water as a form of mind control? Please express your answer as a percent.
Do you believe The Rock when he says he’s not using performance-enhancing drugs?
In the season of Top Model when the judges changed to using a numeric scoring system to rate models as opposed to just saying what they think, would you say this was:
A) More objective because it’s based in numbers
B) Similarly subjective to the previous system, just expressed in a different form?
