Jury duty has been quite a trial (ha get it?!), i have been serving the community, as a crime-fighter as my friend likes to call it, pretty much 5 days a week for 2 weeks now. Its hard going, we have to be at the court at 9am to be locked (yes locked) into a small room with one large table, no natural light and dehydrated coffee in polystyrene cups. We are kept in this room for about 1.5 hours until we are called to the court by a kindhearted old sheriff who i think will have a heart attack each time he climbs the stairs. We stay in court for an hour and a half, listening to the meandering prosecution and the strutting and pompous defense lawyer, then its back to our den for morning tea. After 20 mins we are back in court till 1pm, where we break for lunch again in our rabbit hutch. Then comes 2pm we are back in court till 4pm. All this time we shuffle back and forth like drones, when ever the lawyers want to squabble about evidence and what not. Its all done at quite an irritatingly slow speed.
Not to say its not interesting, in the past week its really become quite absorbing, but to race home afterwards and try to do a full days work before i fall asleep is taking its toll. Luckily my boss is being super cool about this and had set me up with wireless remote desktop thingie for my laptop.
It seems this jury duty has come at a time when there is a natural lull in things before the spring summer crazy time. So that's a good thing, and once this is over (which is next week) i will be free for 5 years if not forever.
My follow jurors are quite a sight, most of them are quite lovely and very nice. But one has an opinion on everything from where the bullet proofed windows are made to the utterly interesting 100 differences between his Prius and his MX5. The term "going on" is sent to a strange new place orbiting the world Fat Mouth with this guy. You see peoples eyes glaze when he whines "well that's interesting you say that because..." Or "I grew up with his mother's dog's hair brush's toilet seat and they use to.." The other is Bobblehead, she is quite harmless and very sweet but you mention the Olympics and her head shakes like San Francisco in 1902. It does not help she has a voice like a corroded iron hinge. I am thinking peoples nuances become magnified by a trillion in such a pressure cooker environment, i have become positively mute most of the time, till i think Yappy has had too much airtime.
It is genuinely fun when the lawyers go for each other throats and the judge has to prize them apart like a primary school teacher in the school yard. It is also amazing when they get a principle witness, the last of which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I do look forward to having regular hours again and not needing to go hide in the toilet for some quiet time.
