I've been unusually quiet this week because I've been extra busy since I was selected for jury service. The jury service itself took all of yesterday and the day before--and I wasn't even selected to serve on a jury. Yuck. I feel it's important to do my civic duty, and I would have found serving on an actual jury to be an interesting experience that would potentially offer ideas for future writing (such is always the selfish motivation for authors to do anything unusual, right?). But sitting and listening to lawyers grill potential jury members for two days is not my idea of fun. I had no idea that the jury selection process could take so long. The worst thing was, this was a medical malpractice suit (wrongful death), and I had enough connection to the doctors in question that I was pretty sure the plaintiff would have wanted to excuse me for cause. Though 20+ other jurors got excused for cause, and 7 or others were excused by the lawyers for whatever unstated reasons, they never did get to me and so I just had to silently watch for the entire time. I'm all for doing my civic duty, but that didn't much feel like it. Oh well.
With jury duty taking up basically my entire days, and leaving me pretty exhausted at the end of each day, I haven't had a whole lot of time for writing. Over the weekend I did a lot more planning, but it wasn't until late last night that I actually did any writing. It was only 500 words or so, but that's something. So, as of last night the total stands:
Yeah, jury service sucks, even if it can be interesting. Especially since you don't get paid. THat's the suckiest. I'm all about doing your civic duty, but hey, even soldiers and national guardspeople get paid.
ReplyDeleteActually, in my county you do get paid--far less than minimum wage, but whatever. It's $12 for the first day, and then $20 for the next 5 days, and then $40 for each day after that. Umm, that's $1.50, $2.50, and $5 per hour respectively. Kids at McDonald's make signficantly more than any of that. Oh well, fortunately many employers who salary their employees give full pay for time at jury service.
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