This morning it’s raining magnificently…again. Storm after storm has hit California and bounced over the Sierras into Arizona. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
Haven’t seen rain like this in many years. Matter of fact…we haven’t see much rain, period, in years. Or at least so it seems. The reservoirs are now filled up, so the general low-level hysteria about the water situation will settle down a bit.
That’s probably not a good thing: a few rainstorms will not make a decades-old drought go away. This kind of weather would need to go on and on, to be a permanent fixture the way it was when I was a girl here. Back in the primeval period, we had rain like this every winter, come February, and it also rained in the summer time. In August, thunderstorms would roll in about 4 in the afternoon. They’d break the heat, dropping temps from the low hundreds to the mid- or low 80s. A 115-degree day was almost unheard-of; today they’re commonplace.
Too damn many people with too damn little care for the world around them. Oh well. That world is gone now. It won’t be back, at least not in our lifetimes. So might as well forget about it.
Meanwhile, with a flood pouring off the roof, I ran outside with buckets and plastic trash cans by way of gathering water for the plants that live indoors or under the eaves. When it rains this much, I tend to forget that about half the outdoor potted plants aren’t eligible for rainfall. 🙂
Already poured one scrub-bucketful of fresh rainwater on the calla lily, which was mightily peeved at not getting rained on in the last storms. Will scoop up a fair amount more for the rose bush on the east side, which probably will need to be transplanted into a bigger pot before the weather starts to get warm. The rest can go on the ficus, the potted palm, and the indoor greenery.
All of which provides a fine work-avoidance gambit.
But I must hurry. I have 15,000 more words to read between now and the day I have to show up (again!) for effing jury duty. That’s to read. Then I have to go back over the current chunk of 30,000 words and check — as fast as I can! — the edits I’ve made. Some stuff is going to get missed, partly because the job is mind-numbing and partly because it’s just too much to get through in under a week.
Can you believe it? Hauled down to the courthouse to waste another day (at least!) AGAIN! Every time I turn around, I get another summons. Usually it starts with the county. Then I get one from the city courts. Then I get another from the feds.
At least the federal courts are reasonably well organized. When you get down to the federal courthouse, you are already impaneled on a jury and you go straight to the judge’s courtroom for voir-dire.
At the county, you have to show up at 8 a.m. — if you don’t appear on time, they count that as not showing up at all and you can be charged with a crime. Then they park you in a waiting room where you sit. And sit. And sit. And sit. And sit. All day long. If you’re lucky, they may let you go around 4 p.m., but you’re told to expect to be there until 5:00.
They may haul you into a courtroom to be interviewed, but usually you’ll be discarded. Then, with any luck, you can go home. But maybe not. You may have to go back to the waiting room and sit.
It used to be that you had to sit there and listen to damned televisions blatting at you, since apparently the majority of Americans are comforted and soothed by the sound of TV sets blathering away. If you’ve brought the work that you can’t afford not to be doing, well…tough.
Now at least they have a quiet room — or they did, the last time I was there. Using it entails getting your computer past the security guards, an iffy proposition. So far I’ve managed to get in without having my work confiscated. But the paranoia grows more acute with each passing day. So we’ll see what happens when I try to carry my laptop in there next week.
To complicate matters, they’ve moved the parking about a half-mile or so from the courthouse. So you’re supposed to find the parking structure (not easy in the mess that is downtown Phoenix — it’s a maze of one-way streets) and then hop a shuttle to the courthouse. Later, after the rain lets up, I’m going to drive downtown and try to find both the structure and the courthouse. Otherwise, trying to locate it at 7:30 in the morning will be a horror show.
You know, I wouldn’t mind being called if, like the feds, the county and the city could get their act together and not waste my time. But I really hate having a day ripped out of my schedule with no compensation and no consideration whatsoever.
One of my friends was called up. She was a political science Ph.D., and so powerfully opinionated that (believe it or not!) she made me look like an avatar of even-handed open-mindedness. Being who and what she was, she was thrilled to serve.
She was impaneled for a civil case. The judge told the selected jurors that he expected the case to last about three days and asked if that would be a hardship for anyone.
You understand: she had two jobs. One was an adjunct teaching position at the Great Desert University. When you’re adjunct, if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid. There are no substitute teachers for courses taught by adjuncts, so your students lose out on the coursework for which they are paying through the schnozz. But three days, she figured she could finesse. So she made no objection.
The trial went on for over three weeks!
She lost three weeks worth of pay. She had to pay a friend, out of pocket, to cover her course, and even then her students had fallen way behind by the time she got back to work.
Teaching is not considered important enough that a judge will excuse you from jury duty. Interestingly, though, seeing to it that people pay their taxes on time is: my accountant friend has repeatedly gotten himself excused by stating, correctly, that he had to prepare clients’ tax returns on time.
One thing I did learn, by accident, is that if you ask to have your “service” rescheduled and you can finagle them to schedule you on the day before Christmas, you’re likely to get completely out of it. What happens is that lawyers do not want to show up at the courthouse on the day before a major holiday. So try to wangle an appointment right up against a Christmas, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July, and although you may have to show up, you’ll be sent home quickly.
Welp, enough with the ranting. Unfortunately, I’ve got to get to work!
Ay yi yi! That seems unnecessarily inefficient!
When I moved to the US, I lived here for a few years without seeing a jury summons. Once I was slapped with a moving violation I got a jury summons within a couple of weeks – which I sent back, ticking the box “Not a US citizen” – which got me off the hook for YEARS.
Of course, after I finally did become a US citizen, I received a new jury summons within the next month 😀
Here in my county, you are mailed your summons, along with instructions to call an automated line, or visit a web page, after 5pm the day *before* your first day of service – where you are instructed to enter your badge number off the paperwork.
The website/phone attendant will then give you instructions for the next day – which may be one of
a) show up at 8am for service
b) call back in at X time the next day – you are on call and may be instructed to come in for the afternoon session
c) you are not needed, call back tomorrow evening after 5pm to see if you’re needed the next day
d) you are not needed, thank you for your service and you are cleared for the rest of the week
My last round, at the beginning of January of this year, I actually had a short week – Monday was the January 1st holiday, so I went online Monday night, and it said “you must check in at 11am on Tuesday”
Tuesday at 11am I checked in and it said “check in again after 5pm for Wednesday”.
Tuesday evening it said “you have completed your service, and do not have to call in again”
Whew!
Wow, what a PITA. So they leave you in limbo not for one day but for two? Maybe even three?
I’ve never encountered that. Here, you call after 5 p.m. the day before — so that you CAN’T reach a human being but HAVE to jump through punch-a-button hoops. What you get from the machine is instructions to show up at 8 a.m. with your paperwork in hand, plus a number of unpleasant threats about what they will do to you if you don’t show up, and show up on time.
When you get there, after considerable hassle — parking downtown is always a headache here, and during rush hour you can’t turn left off the streets that carry traffic south — you stand in line to get in the building, because it’s assumed that everyone entering is carrying a pistol or a bomb. So you need to get there a good 15 minutes early.
When you finally make your way upstairs, they check you in and tell you to take a seat. You beg for a place that’s quiet enough to work, since you’ve brought your computer because your clients are NOT your employers but are people who will not pay you and will never hire you again if you don’t get the work done on time.
And you sit there. You sit and sit and sit. Eventually, around 4 or 5 p.m., they tell you to go home.
There’s no lunchroom or other place to eat in the building. if you can’t afford to eat in restaurants because you’re trying to live on Social Security, that’s just tough. You either go hungry or you bolt down your peanut-butter sandwich in the bathroom.
If you’re called in to a jury, the judge will give you a chance to state an excuse for why you should be set free. Nine times out of ten, the answer is no.
Financial hardship is not an excuse.
Self-employment is not an excuse.
Your daughter’s getting married that day is not an excuse.
About the best you can do, if you’re determined to stay off a jury, is to say there’s no way you can be objective about the circumstances of the case or that you have a close friend or relative who was a victim of a similar crime. Or that you were.
I personally would be happy to serve for a day or two. The problem is, I really can’t spare two or three weeks — or even one full week — away from my business. As soon as I finish the book in hand, I expect to have to do not one but two large indexes. Indexes are done against the printer’s deadline. You can’t tell the client “ohhh I’ll get around to it one of these days”!
So what is needed is
a) To set up a system whereby people can volunteer and specify a span of dates that fits their lives;
b) More efficiency in selecting citizens for jury panels (the federal courts have already figured this out);
c) Provide parking NEXT TO or under the courthouse;
d) Provide ample “quiet” space where people are not forced to listen to television racket.
e) Provide a place in the building for prospective jurors to eat lunch.
None of these things should be difficult for the county to accomplish.
I haven’t been summoned for jury service since I moved to CA, but I had experience with it in Chicago/Cook County. In my 30 years living there as an adult of age to serve, I was only summoned 5 times. Four of those times were for civil cases and I was selected to be on a jury once. It wasn’t a big hardship since I was a college student at the time; I missed a few classed, but NBD. The three other times I just had to show up and wait around most of the day to be empaneled. I recall getting a lot of pleasure reading done.
Once I was summoned for a criminal trial. The criminal courthouse was in a really inconvenient area of town with few decent places to eat nearby. I knew this and prepared by bringing a lunch (tuna salad, as I recall, which was kept cold with an ice pack). I got to the voir dire stage with the criminal trial and was dismissed, likely because I was considered a poor juror due to these reasons.
1) Before the lawyers even started with their standard questions, the judge gave us a little speech about how we’d have to follow his instructions and should let him know if that was a problem. I think that’s a standard spiel, so he seemed surprised when I immediately raised my hand and said I’d have a problem with that. He asked me to explain, and I told him I’d been on a trial before [referring to the civil trial when I was in college] and I had found it immensely frustrating that I could not ask questions during the lawyers examination. I thought there were clearly logical gaps in the course of questioning and felt I had needed to understand better to make a decision as a juror. Judge said I wasn’t going to be allowed to ask questions. I said that I really had a hard time making a decision in the jury room without that info. [I was basically volunteering that if he put me in the jury box he’d likely have a hung jury for this first degree murder case.]
2) Standard questioning continued, nonetheless. When I was asked what sort of newspapers and magazines I read, I said I didn’t regularly read any local newspapers, but that I did read Utne and Fast Company. Judge said he’d never heard of those. He asked if I ever read things like People. I told him no.
I was dismissed in the first round.
All of this is totally true and I did not fabricate or exaggerate any of my answers. I simply told the absolute truth: I am a questioner, and I do not consume popular media. So, I was considered a back juror and dismissed. It’s interesting that they don’t want independent thinkers as jurors, isn’t it? I understand why they don’t allow jurors to question the witnesses, but it would be great if they allowed them to funnel questions through the lawyers.
We’ll see what happens when I get my first summons in CA.
It’s so that at least SOME lawyers (and apparently some judges) don’t want jurors who are educated or free thinkers. Ideally, they want people whose thinking can be manipulated through the use of various triggers, or who do not question authority unduly.
Some people imagine that just having the PhD will get you off. But that’s clearly not so — one of my deans was impaneled not once but twice. And the friend who was stuck in the civil case for three weeks had a doctorate in political science. So obviously, education alone is not a Scarlet Letter. But I suspect that education + a credible clue that you’re an independent thinker could make you persona non grata.
Wow! Imagine a judge who’s never heard of _Utne Reader_! And in a real city, not in the backwoods of Arkansas. Where do you suppose he went to school? Bob Jones U? Can you get an LL.D. from the University of Phoenix? :eyeroll:
Hey, watch what you say about the backwoods of Arkansas! According to my Arizona relatives, your state ain’t any better. ;oD
Ha ha!!! You got THAT right. Matter of fact, in many respects said backwoods are far more enlightened than lovely crazy Arizona!