Jury Duty

Here I am, sitting in the Jury Assembly Room of the Civic Center Courthouse.

I received my summons for jury duty a few weeks ago, checked the website Friday afternoon, and found that I did indeed need to report in today.

I served on a jury about 3 years ago, and actually found the process rather fascinating. I'm wondering how far along in the system I'll go this time around.

So far, this experience is already a lot better than last time. This time, I'm at the Courthouse in Civic Center, by City Hall. It's a much nicer building than the one I had to report to last time on Folsom Street. Also, last time, there wasn't any good public transportation options, so I had to drive, and park at a pricey lot. This time, it's MUNI to Civic Center! Much better.

The jury assembly room is also much nicer. Lots of large, wooden tables, with plenty of outlets for all of us and our laptops. I opted to pay the $5.95/day for wireless internet access. Since we're on the basement level, my iPhone doesn't have a signal, and I just couldn't sit around for who knows how long without checking email, surfing the web, and updating my Facebook status! Plus, you know, the beauty of laptops: there's always work to do. :)

So, here I am. I got here around 8:15 (15 minutes early) and was able to snag a nice, large table in the room. I've got my bottle of water, my dried fruit to snack on, and my laptop to work on, and to keep me company.

We'll see how it goes.
Stay tuned.

update
12:00 Noon

Well, that was fairly uneventful. They pulled us into the court room at 10:00, then proceeded to tell us how long the trial was scheduled to go for. 6 weeks! I wouldn't have minded serving on a jury, not even for that long, but I decided to submit a hardship form since that would've been too long for me to go without work/pay. I was sent back to the jury assembly room to see if there are any other, shorter trials that I could be considered for, but when I got down there, I was dismissed for at least another year.

So, I'm out about $9 from the experience: $5.95 for wireless internet (which I used for about 1.5 hours) and $3 for round trip MUNI fare. Not bad.