After seven days of utter boredom, my privileged duty to the United States government, or at least a county in Ohio, adjourned yesterday. Hopefully it will be a long time before I have to return to Franklin County’s Court of Common Pleas as a potential juror or otherwise.
Besides the couple hours spent in preparation for a murder case which never happened, which I mentioned in the last post, I read. And sat. And sat and read and sat and read and read and sat some more. And after fighting off falling asleep in my folding chair because I was so tired of reading, I read some more. While I sat. And finally they let us out for lunch where I ate while I sat and read.
I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Children of Hurin” cover to cover by day three. By day five, I had finished Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke,” which I just read they’re making into a movie. He’s the guy that wrote “Fight Club.” Liking “Choke,” I had gotten halfway through Palahniuk’s “Lullaby” by day seven.
Things were so slow the commissioners let us off for the Friday of the first week of service as well as Thursday and Friday of the following week — the Thursday and Friday being today and tomorrow.
Highlights of service for me included watching three jurors put up a Christmas tree at the end of week one. And yesterday they played a movie for us: “Wild Hogs.” It’s a Disney movie staring Tim Allen where a group of middle-aged men take their motor cycles out for a long ride only to cruise into hilarious antics. As if we weren’t being tortured enough.
I tried bringing Tiffany’s laptop in one day but couldn’t connect to the court’s network. And we all know a computer without Internet access is completely worthless. On Monday of week two, I found a computer lab hidden in the back. Of the five working machines, only two had Internet access, which all 100 or so jurors who weren’t on a case would fight for.
There was one girl who hogged one of the machines all week. She would get on for about an hour, then leave for a minute. After somebody else took it, she would watch the door and as soon as somebody exited the little room she’d huff back in to try and steal it back. She sat there in total for days with the back of her shirt raised a full eight inches from her pants and a fat roll hanging out while the monitor draped a cool blue light on her mustache. It was agonizing.
Elsewhere I had a woman behind me talking about how she hadn’t removed her toe polish since her wedding two months ago because the quality of the polish was so nice, to which another woman commented how toe nails grow so much slower than finger nails. The comment got the first girl talking about how she doesn’t have to cut one of her pinkie toe nails very often because of how small it is in comparison to the pinkie nail on the other foot. Nasty.
Then a completely different girl on the other side of me, who could have doubled for Urkel from “Family Matters,” starts talking to herself again.
Honestly, I’m not sure this whole trial by your peers is all it’s cracked up to be. These peers of mine are a bloody mess.
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