My Butt Hurts

The weekend was a whirlwind. I went away with some girlfriends and had a great time on the beach, at restaurants, shopping, and just hanging out sans little people and Cheeto-tinted handprints on my clothes. Came home after dinner last night, straightened up the kitchen, made lunches for today, put my stuff away, read the paper, and crashed in bed.

Today, I sat on my ass.

You might think that sounds like a good thing. Au contraire, my friends. Because today, I participated in this country's great and noble justice system. Today, I had jury duty. I finagled rides home from schools for my kids, swapped out my co-op day, begged a relative to babysit for the afternoon, moved my paying work around, and generally created a lot of chaos on the homefront to do my civic duty.

That meant reporting to the courthouse at 8:30 and standing in a big, long line outside before passing through a metal detector and heading to the jury lounge. And that sounds nice, but it's a lot like an airport. Metal chairs in rows, vending machines, TVs suspended from the ceiling.

We watched a video starring the late Ed Bradley around 9 a.m., telling us all about the history of the jury system. We were greeted by a judge. We were given papers and thanked.

There were 300 of us. In the jury room. Which looked like an airport.

The morning passed. Hour by hour. I emailed. I read my book. I got some nuts out of the vending machine and munched for awhile. I peed.

At around 12:30, we were told to go to lunch. Nobody had been called yet for a trial. So all 300 of us headed out. Lunch lasted an hour and a half, which provoked some grumbling from people who'd really rather get this court show on the road. When we got back, at around 2, I snagged a seat next to an electrical outlet (there aren't enough outlets, for the record) and got to recharge my laptop.

I read the paper. I emailed some more. I fidgeted and stretched and sighed, and listened to other people's cell phone conversations. I thought about how much work time I'd lost and calculated the money I didn't make. I wondered how my kids' school day was. I remembered we had no bread in the house and hoped I'd have time to swing by the store on the way home so we'd have lunch tomorrow.

Finally, at 4 p.m., we were set free. Everybody was given a check for $15. All 300 of us. None of whom ever got called to do anything beyond sit in the jury room that resembled an airport.

Did you get that? Not a single person. But all 300 of us got paid for the day. I thought about how much of my tax money went down the judicial toilet today, and I got good and angry about it, and I pondered how things could go better. I thought about an on-call system--everybody has cell phones. I wondered about beepers. And I pondered the sense of having three hundred people sit around for nine hours, doing nothing, and then dipping their hands into the public coffers for the privilege.

I stopped by the store on the way home, so we have bread now. One thing got accomplished. Tonight, I'll sleep on my stomach and give my butt a break. And in five years when I get called again for this, I'll remember to take a few movies with me. But I hope that by then, something might have made all of this more efficient.