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I have always felt that everyone should do their civic duty and serve as a peer on a jury panel. I use the term “serve” here in the same way I would use the phrase “waste your time”. Let me explain.

The other day I had the privilege of waiting around to see if I would be selected to serve on a jury panel. I partook of this privilege so much, in fact, that I did absolutely nothing productive for an entire six hours except for sculpting my butt into roughly the same shape as a 1950’s era folding chair. The day started with me arriving at the court house just in time to start an hour long wait while the judge pressed his robes (or something). Or maybe he was suffering through some kind of monologue presented by the defense attorney. I could actually believe that, based on the show she put on for us during the selection process. More on that later.

For me, this was a particularly bad time to serve on a jury, so I was very interested in getting out of my jury service. I spent my time waiting to go into the court room by coming up with all kinds of what I called “Out Cards”. It wasn’t too hard, to be honest. My family’s history is replete with various run-ins with the law; mostly drug and alcohol related incidents and none of them directly involving me (this is an important distinction). Most of these court cases - this one included - deal with DUI or drug-related charges, so I was pretty certain that I’d be able to throw one of my Out Cards if I needed to and manipulate the details just enough to get me out of the pool. Some people might call this “deception” or “lying”. I call it “being technical”. Lawyers do this all the time, so why not?

My efforts to build excuses for not sitting on the jury would prove to be unnecessary. What I should have been doing was strengthening my resilience to monologues, because it most certainly was going to be put to the test this day. Not by a judge who would challenge my Out Card, but by a particularly probing defense attorney who seemed oblivious to the fact that everyone else in that courtroom might actually have a life.

Our first test, though, came from the judge himself. This man was nice enough, and seemed particularly jovial for a trial judge. Not Judge Harry Stone jovial, but certainly not Perry Mason, either. I understand that Perry Mason was a lawyer, and not a judge, but as with most of my comparisons like this, I don’t care.

The problem I had with the judge stemmed mainly from his inability to make things move in a timely manner. I’m seriously convinced that he had some kind of time vortex operating around him, because no matter what he said, it was always said consisely and with the conviction of a man who was convinced that rocks need to slow down. There was nothing uttered from this man’s mouth that wasn’t said at half the speed of normal human speech pacing. There were points during his diatribes that I felt like I was dragging Kevin Federline’s singing career behind me. I wanted to be able to leave, but something compelled me to stay. I think it’s called “the fear of spending time in jail and becoming intimate with someone named Ben Dover.”

Speech was not the only thing that was slow about this judge. Recesses were not exactly swift, either. Whenever he said “10 minute recess” he really meant 20 minutes. And he liked to call the prosecution and defense lawyers to the bench a lot. Did I mention that both councilors were blond and female?

Speaking of the lawyers, let’s get back to the defense attorney. I’m almost positive that she was convinced that this was her chance to audition for a part on Law and Order. The prosecution had a grand total of four questions to ask the potential jurors. Her total time was five minutes. We liked the prosecution. The defense took longer than 45 minutes to ask her questions. She walked around the room and used terms such as “reasonable doubt” and “presumed innocence” a lot. I was mildly amused at her antics, but there were definitely people in that room who, if they had been allowed to carry machetes into the court, would have made use of them right then and there. By this time it was 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and she was still wanting to ask questions! When the judge - at the breakneck speed that was his trademark - told her that she needed to wrap up in five minutes, she actually said, and I am not making this up, that she “still had a number of questions to ask and wouldn’t be done in that amount of time.”

The sound of smuggled machetes being unsheathed was unmistakable.

To be honest, the day wasn’t a total wash. As much as I make it sound like it was completely boring, it really wasn’t. I would say that it was a perfect example of how to completely waste a person’s time but still provide a mildly amusing form of entertainment, not unlike watching the really bad auditions on American Idol. I wasn’t selected to be on the panel, and I felt sorry for those who were; they had to come back the next day and sit through another selection process before they were whittled down from 21 to nine. But better them than me. Now I can waste my time at work and get paid a lot more.