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Jury Duty
Wednesday, July 1, 1998 I was lying in bed last night, when I suddenly remembered a form that was on the kitchen counter. Hadn't it said something about Jury Duty? And wasn't the date to report in the beginning of July? But I convinced myself that the report date was next week, and went back to sleep. So I was all ready to leave for work this morning, went to look at the form, and saw the horrible words, "July 1"! The truly shameful aspect of this: I had committed myself to helping out my sister by picking up my nephew J--- in mid-afternoon and taking him to a tapdance class in the North End. Now all her plans would have to change, at great inconvenience to everyone, all through my slackness. I called her (she gets up early with two boys) and gave her the bad news, apologizing abjectly. I sent email from my home account to my manager, cc'ing the rest of the program managers on the team, and set off to drive to the Regional Justice Center in Kent.
Kent is a town about 25 miles south of Seattle, in the Duwamish Valley. Many Native American names survive in the landscape around here: Duwamish, Snohomish, Issaquah. The highway follows the ridge, then you take the exit and a road goes down a steep hill to the valley floor. I didn't know exactly where the Regional Justice Center was, but I'd been to Kent a few times before, so I figured I'd find the street and I did.
An elderly gentleman was talking with a sheriff in the parking garage, so I asked them if I was in the right place to park, since there were various warnings about parking on the summons I'd received. The older man said that I was, and he was a juror too. I followed along after him, through the breeze-way and the metal detector, and up to the Juror Assembly area on the second floor. I checked in to the office. It was ok that I hadn't filled in and returned the upper portion of the form; they were just glad to have me there! Each juror got a form on a clipboard to fill out and hang on to. We went and sat in one of two waiting rooms, with a folding wall in between. There was also a kitchen area. The effect of being in this space was like being in an airport waiting area. The female supervisor who made announcements to us over the public address system was like a flight attendant, and the judge who made a speech to us in the morning (and how he worked the Lewis and Clark expedition in to it, I can't imagine!), well, he was like the captain of the plane! All of the chairs were just alike, with no comfy couches or anything. I guess if there was any difference in the seating, it would lead to disputes about whose turn it was to sit where!
I wasn't picked in the first jury called in the morning, so I ready the books I had brought with me. I finished the first one, and started on the second, a Georgette Heyer novel that I have read before. But since I'd read April Lady so many times before -- Heyer is one of my favorite authors -- it went rather quickly and it was clear I would finish it before the end of the day. At the lunch break, I walked four or five blocks to "downtown" Kent. I scoped out several lunch places, and that sure sign of a marginal business district, several antique stores. I walked around a corner and found what I was looking for, a used book store. An unusual feature of this place, they had romance fiction and general fiction all mixed together! I selected several books and chatted a bit with the woman working there. I would have thought that she'd get jurors there every day (and we were supposed to be wearing our juror badge to prevent overhearing any lawyers talking about cases) but it seemed that she hadn't talked to anyone on jury duty before, and she had a lot of questions. I walked to a homey place called "The Country Cafe" that I had seen earlier. Homey is really the operative word: it was just like being in someone's informal kitchen, not pretty or cute, but unselfconsciously kitschy. I sat next to two other women jurors and we chatted a bit. The rest of the afternoon I kept on reading. The later it got, the less likely we'd be called to a courtroom that day. They played "Apollo 13" on video monitors, but only had the sound on in one of the waiting rooms, thank heaven! Finally our keeper said that we were done for the day. They would definitely need forty of us to come back on Monday. If coming on Monday would present a hardship, we should come up to her window then and tell her so, and she'd take that into consideration when "randomly" selecting the lucky ones who could go for good. Since I really didn't have a good reason not to be selected, other than the fact that I'd rather be working, I didn't approach the window. There was still a chance that I'd be let go! But alas, my name was called, and I'll be back on Monday morning.
At home in the early evening, I worked on this month's journal graphics, but it was clear I wouldn't get them done tonight. Next month I'll start earlier! Tech notes: I used a graphic image from The Graphics Depot as the basis for this month's look. They have a huge downloadable archive of tiled patterns! One of the pictures I took the other night pleased me, so I used it as well. It's a mirror shot, flipped, with the top of my head recreated by Image Composer.
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The Justice Center is a very good looking building, only a year or so old. It has the neo-classical look appropriate to a civic structure, with a central rotunda and two wings leading off from it. Even the 