Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Doing My Duty as an America Citizen

I had jury duty today.Don't worry, I wasn't chosen, so my strange way of looking at the world wasn't foisted upon the judicial system.
The morning was spent in "The Jury Room" where we all waited to be called, or not called in my case.
They bragged about the unlimited coffee they kept fresh for us.
This was a non-issue for me because I hate coffee in all it's nefarious, EE-VIL forms.
But they also supplied the jury room with an old TV set on a rolling cart, and below it on the shelves were: 1) A VHS VCR, 2) A jumble of old, pre-recorded VHS tape movies, and 3) a stack of 300, 500, and 1000 piece puzzles.
They had Robocop, so I was planning to start that if things got desperate enough to watch an old VHS tape.
The clouds parted for me when they mentioned that, for jurors, the building's cafe gave out free coffee and hot chocolate.
I'm not much for hot drinks, but hot chocolate?  Heck yeah.
So I went down there and walked past the meager little coffee cups and got me a McDonald's medium sized Styrofoam soda "cup" and topped it off with the free hot chocolate.
I immediately scalded my tongue, mouth, and the first few inches of my throat. That was the 12,654th reminder of why I avoid hot drinks.
I had to wait over 30 minutes for the chocolate to be drinkable, but it lasted me a while.
I spent a solid hour reading one of my camera manuals on my little tablet, I like to read non-fiction in waiting rooms, and learned some camera features that I either didn't know were there or how to better use features I knew about.
Then I dozed a while, I don't think I snored, but I wasn't awake enough to be sure, so...
Then just before lunch time, they let the rest of us go.
The state of Florida uses the list of licensed drivers for their pool of folks to choose for jurors, not the registered voter rolls like many people think.
I've known a lot of people in my life that didn't register to vote simply becasue they don't want to be a juror.
You'd get a surprise if you assumed you were "safe" from that in Florida.