Jury Duty
Phooey, no internet. Guess I get to just write this in Word and post it later. I’ve been worried about my jury duty date since I got the notice, and today’s the day. Left home at 7:20am, got here about 8:10am, so clearly it doesn’t take a whole hour to get to Oakland County Courthouse from our house. Most of the people here are dressed biz casual, a couple in jeans. I honestly wish I’d worn jeans today, but I’m OK in my dress pants and comfy shirt. They gave us badge holders and a pamphlet, then had a judge talk to us for a few minutes about the different kinds of courts we might be in, and had us watch a 10 minute rah-rah video about being on a jury. Now everyone is sitting around doing their own thing except for a few who are talking to each other, and Tony Danza is on one TV and some court TV is on another. Who’s bright idea was it to give Tony Danza a talk show? I can’t even hear it from here (especially with my little iPod Shuffle headphones in), but I’m annoyed. And I watched “Who’s the Boss?” regularly too, and liked it. Seriously, I heard about the accident in the mini-car thing, and figured that his show would be off the air by now. He’s currently getting his face exfoliated by Susan Lucci. Is she selling cosmetics now? You miss so much when you have to go to work every day and miss out on the daytime talk shows. Seriously, Tony looks really, really gay right now. Maybe he’s made some lifestyle changes since the 80’s…
I’ve been working on the presentation I have to do in a few weeks, but I just can’t get into it. Why the hell did I agree to do this? It’s a stupid topic - “Making your training guide easy to follow” - how am I supposed to talk about that for an hour? There are so many more interesting and important topics, like how do you get people to look at your guide the next day, or use any of the information in it? Or even, how do you get people to pay attention to you in your session and look at the guide WHILE they’re there? I can honestly say the only training session I’ve been to where I refer back to the training guide have been the ones for HIPAA, and I did so because I had to get our company into compliance, and there was information that would help me do that.
So a guy nearby just asked for a retainer to finish some litigation. Are lawyers allowed to do jury duty? Don’t they pretty much know everyone in the courthouse already? I’d be surprised if they weren’t automatically excused. I know that if I were on trial, I wouldn’t be comfortable with a lawyer on my jury - especially if there was a chance he/she knew the attorney for the other side…