![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jury Duty Fun
Mar. 3rd, 2010 09:57 pmCan't remember if I mentioned getting a summons a few weeks back, but I was called for jury duty. Joy!
It turned out to be a far cry less painful than I was afraid it might be. There were several rooms where they were showing movies- idiotic movies that should never have been made. Hello, Monster in Law. And there was a quiet room. I decided to take my chances there. Signs posted admonished against any speaking at all, and the um...jury candidate babysitters informed us that they were listening in on all rooms, so they would know what was going on. Not to mention security cameras and all that jazz.
Despite all this, knowing how people are in this city, I was afraid that I would end up in a room full of blathering idiots. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that people actually followed directions and shut the hell up. Woohoo! I took a backpack full of books with me, plus my ipod. Spent most of the day in a reasonably comfortable chair, listening to music in blissful quiet. Oh, and the guy sitting across from me looked like Topher Grace's long lost twin. That was a little weird.
The main irritations were people getting really noisy after lunch- I was just about to issue a general "Hey, don't you people read the signs? I and the rest of us came to this room for a reason" when they finally all shut up again. And a security guard telling me I was acting weird.
Wanna know why? I was looking up at a stained glass dome. See...the inside of the Baltimoe courthouse is really pretty. Three s a lot of gorgeous marble and granite carvings and Doric style columns and mosaic floors...and a stained glass domed ceiling above one of the marble stairways. During the lunch break, I was walking around a couple of the hallways (They told us where we were and were not allowed to be, so I wasn't in an off-limits area or anyhting like that.) A guard walking by asked what I was doing (As if it would be so hard to tell by the fact that I was standing by the steps (not in anyone's way), looking up at the elaborate stained glass work above my head) and I said just that, that I was looking at the dome and commented that architecture and art history interested me, and there was quite a bit to see in the building. He then informed me that since he had checked my bags when I came in, he knew I was there for jury duty and that I didn't have any weapons on me that I was going to do anything, but that I should be careful because it was weird and might arouse suspicion.
Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard things like this- taking an interest in the aesthetics of a public building makes people think you're a terrorist or criminal or something.
The guard was rather sadly mistaken though when he said that they'd checked my bags so he knew I wasn't carrying anything I shouldn't be- I had a backpack with four zipper compartments and a couple of smaller inner pockets. They barely glanced into the main large compartment and saw some books. A weapon could easily have gotten in that building just by being stuck between the books or at the bottom of my bag or in a smaller pocket. They didn't even run the bags through the metal detector that everyone has to walk through- they take your bag on the counter, you walk through the detector, they glance in your bag and they hand it to you on the other side. When I left and came back at lunch they didn't even do that, just waved me around the detector.
Yeah, you're smart. And you're worried about how weird it seems that I was looking at a pretty ceiling? Oh, the idiocy. You don't really bother with the most basic of security measures, but you get all suspicious at someone's appreciation of a work of art. What the fuck is wrong with this?
/rant
Towards the end of the day, a large segment of the jury pool (yours truly included) were called in for selection. There were probably about a hundred and fifty of us there, and the woman sitting next to me kept saying every few seconds that the whole process should be over in five minutes and why the hell was it taking so long? Gah, why couldn't she just shut up. I was actually impressed that their system actually seemed to be going rather efficiently. Maybe not as well as I could imagine I would do, but hey, I couldn't find a whole lot to complain about, idiots sitting near me aside, of course. After the first few minutes, about the only thing keeping me from smacking her was the presence of so many witnesses, cameras and law enforcement officials in the room and even that was a pretty loose tether after a while.
I am reasonably sure that I was going to be one of the people picked for the jury- I was one of the few people that I noticed who didn't stand up to give a "yes" response to any of their weeding-out questions. But in the middle of all that, they suddenly dismissed everyone back to theplaypens holding rooms without warning or explanation. After we got back there, someone said it was because the prosecuting attorney had pictures of the defendant at the crime scene sitting out in the open (did I mention, it was an attempted murder/assualt case? Yeah.) I actually saw one of the pictures, but it was just a big green blob. Looked like someone had pointed the camera straight down at a patch of grass and took the shot. But yeah, potentially biasing. So...we were all dismissed. Guess that trial won't be starting on the scheduled date.
So...jury duty. Yeah. I did some reading, began a little writing, spent most of the time being not bothered by all the people. Got paid fifteen bucks for my trouble.
It turned out to be a far cry less painful than I was afraid it might be. There were several rooms where they were showing movies- idiotic movies that should never have been made. Hello, Monster in Law. And there was a quiet room. I decided to take my chances there. Signs posted admonished against any speaking at all, and the um...jury candidate babysitters informed us that they were listening in on all rooms, so they would know what was going on. Not to mention security cameras and all that jazz.
Despite all this, knowing how people are in this city, I was afraid that I would end up in a room full of blathering idiots. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that people actually followed directions and shut the hell up. Woohoo! I took a backpack full of books with me, plus my ipod. Spent most of the day in a reasonably comfortable chair, listening to music in blissful quiet. Oh, and the guy sitting across from me looked like Topher Grace's long lost twin. That was a little weird.
The main irritations were people getting really noisy after lunch- I was just about to issue a general "Hey, don't you people read the signs? I and the rest of us came to this room for a reason" when they finally all shut up again. And a security guard telling me I was acting weird.
Wanna know why? I was looking up at a stained glass dome. See...the inside of the Baltimoe courthouse is really pretty. Three s a lot of gorgeous marble and granite carvings and Doric style columns and mosaic floors...and a stained glass domed ceiling above one of the marble stairways. During the lunch break, I was walking around a couple of the hallways (They told us where we were and were not allowed to be, so I wasn't in an off-limits area or anyhting like that.) A guard walking by asked what I was doing (As if it would be so hard to tell by the fact that I was standing by the steps (not in anyone's way), looking up at the elaborate stained glass work above my head) and I said just that, that I was looking at the dome and commented that architecture and art history interested me, and there was quite a bit to see in the building. He then informed me that since he had checked my bags when I came in, he knew I was there for jury duty and that I didn't have any weapons on me that I was going to do anything, but that I should be careful because it was weird and might arouse suspicion.
Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard things like this- taking an interest in the aesthetics of a public building makes people think you're a terrorist or criminal or something.
The guard was rather sadly mistaken though when he said that they'd checked my bags so he knew I wasn't carrying anything I shouldn't be- I had a backpack with four zipper compartments and a couple of smaller inner pockets. They barely glanced into the main large compartment and saw some books. A weapon could easily have gotten in that building just by being stuck between the books or at the bottom of my bag or in a smaller pocket. They didn't even run the bags through the metal detector that everyone has to walk through- they take your bag on the counter, you walk through the detector, they glance in your bag and they hand it to you on the other side. When I left and came back at lunch they didn't even do that, just waved me around the detector.
Yeah, you're smart. And you're worried about how weird it seems that I was looking at a pretty ceiling? Oh, the idiocy. You don't really bother with the most basic of security measures, but you get all suspicious at someone's appreciation of a work of art. What the fuck is wrong with this?
/rant
Towards the end of the day, a large segment of the jury pool (yours truly included) were called in for selection. There were probably about a hundred and fifty of us there, and the woman sitting next to me kept saying every few seconds that the whole process should be over in five minutes and why the hell was it taking so long? Gah, why couldn't she just shut up. I was actually impressed that their system actually seemed to be going rather efficiently. Maybe not as well as I could imagine I would do, but hey, I couldn't find a whole lot to complain about, idiots sitting near me aside, of course. After the first few minutes, about the only thing keeping me from smacking her was the presence of so many witnesses, cameras and law enforcement officials in the room and even that was a pretty loose tether after a while.
I am reasonably sure that I was going to be one of the people picked for the jury- I was one of the few people that I noticed who didn't stand up to give a "yes" response to any of their weeding-out questions. But in the middle of all that, they suddenly dismissed everyone back to the
So...jury duty. Yeah. I did some reading, began a little writing, spent most of the time being not bothered by all the people. Got paid fifteen bucks for my trouble.
