Word of advice- if you ever get called for jury duty, do not, I repeat, do NOT take the optional postponement. I had been warned before but never believed that supposedly if you postpone, they throw your name into a worse jury pool. This is what happened to me. I postponed a couple months ago, probably because I had one of my many Vegas trips planned, and got called back this week. So I show up to the courthouse, chronically on time as always, and of course I have to sit there for half an hour as the late comers arrive before they start giving us instructions. In all there were probably 300 people in there. We fill out a short form, line up to hand our summons and form to the court clerk, then go back and sit down. We watch a short film about how jury duty works which I think I saw the last time I had jury duty five years ago, then we sit and wait while they process our forms. Finally they start calling out names to go up to the 9th floor courtroom. I’m rather surprised at the amount of names they’re calling since I always thought a jury consists of 12 people (as in the title of one of my all time favorite movies, Twelve Angry Men). They call my name somewhere around number 50. So I’m cheerfully get up and head to the elevators. I figured anything is better than sitting in that room much longer. I get up to the courtroom and have a seat as the other prospective jurors file in. I look over to the jury box and see not 12 seats, but more like 18 so I’m not sure what’s up. In the front of the room two female court clerks are chatting with an Asian brother in a suit, obviously a lawyer of some sort. I scan the room to see how many other potential jurors are in the room. The poker player in me always wants to know the odds, and in this case, it looks like there are about 100 of us in there so it looks like 12 out of 100 of us will get picked. Not bad, I liked those odds of not getting picked. After everyone is finally seated the Asian guy steps up to the podium, introduces himself as Steven Lee, an assistant DA or something like that. He reads from a prepared speech but his first words cause quite a stir from all of us- “Today we will be selecting 23 of you for a grand jury that will run five days a week for one month, as well as 7 replacement jurors for grand juries convening in April and July of 2006”. Damn, the odds just went to shit! And the odds would actually get worse from there. I was now sitting there feeling like I was all in with a pocket pair heads up against a flush draw, praying for the board to come up blanks. Except in this case, it’s not just the turn and river cards I have to ride out, it’s 23 cards! And it literally was 23 cards- our names were printed on jury cards that were stuffed into this wooden lottery box type contraption that the clerk would spin and then draw the cards from. Every time she drew a card, I would think to myself, “oh no this is it”, or if I saw she furrowed her brow, I would think “whew, it can’t be me, because I have an easy name to pronounce”. Finally the 23rd seat was drawn (and you know I kept thinking, yeah, just my luck, I’ll probably get picked 23rd) and I relaxed a bit. But that didn’t last long as the judge came in and announced that she would now hear from any of the 23 that felt they had a legitimate reason to be excused. For grand jury, there is no dismissing of jurors based upon a lawyer not liking the way you look, or because of your race or predisposition, or anything other than either being physically, linguistically, or mentally incapable of reviewing evidence, or you could demonstrate that serving would cause you undue hardship in the eyes of the court. One by one, it seemed like at least half of the 23 jurors went up and pleaded with the judge to be excuse. About a dozen actually were excused. Shit. That meant they had to go back and draw 12 more cards. More anxiety. Anyway, to make a long story not-any-longer, this went on for 5 hours! After they got 23 jurors that couldn’t get out of it, they then picked the 7 replacement jurors for April and July. If you thought 5 days a week for a month was bad, those poor seven would have to commit to two days a week for 14 months!!! WTF? Well, lucky me, I dodged every bullet and fortunately didn’t get picked. But it probably took 45 agonizing minutes just to fill the last seat alone as every person that got picked went up to the judge and got excused somehow. So there you have it. 5 hours of torture, sitting on pins and needles not knowing if I’d get picked. I really wouldn’t mind serving some day, since it sounds awfully interesting, but what kept shooting thru my mind was the two major projects at work I have to finish by year end (my bonus is going to be tied to them), and perhaps more importantly, I still want to make one more trip to Vegas in December! I know, I know, it’s a shocker.