Just saying the words Jury Duty brings about sympathetic head nods from strangers, being one of the last of the true shared sacrifices of society left today (besides one of those $110 NYC parking tickets). And it is readily apparent that the people in charge of the system know it. Instead of three days of rotating through the jury pool, it's now just one day. Instead of a four year wait between call-ups, it is now 6. Instead of the old smokey pit of a waiting room, they (Kings county, NYC, that is) has a brand new nice clean spacious room with plenty of comfortable seating, computer stations, and snacks and a cell-phone area, along with some of the nicest (but suprisingly small) bathrooms I've seen in a city building. The clerks and the court officers are nice and friendly, shockingly courteous in fact, and you are even allowed to step outside the building so long as you sign a sign-in/out sheet. In many ways, my first time experience was very pleasant indeed.

Until we got to the lawyers.

The grand caveat to the whole system is that jury duty can mean criminal of <b>civil</b> trials. The big difference is that in criminal trials, the lawyers are ultimately paid to get the verdict; in civil trials they get paid by the hour. The first two hours I felt the attorneys were quite nice and gregarious, by the second day all I wanted was the iceberg to hit the Titanic head on sink that mofo. In my group they picked only 2 jurors out of 10, and took a good 35 minutes in conference to do so. That's not counting the 2.5 hours in questioning us in a group or individually. And they still needed another 20 prospects to pick up the last 2 they would need. The part that truely enraged me was how everybody else in the system seems to appreciate that this is, ultimately, a major inconvenience for everybody. Everybody except the lawyers, who saw us nothing more then meat puppets here to serve at their leisure.

I would never have thought that being so bored would be so entirely exhausting, but there you have it. I did get to chat with a cute girl in my jury pool, but considering that she took an undergraduate class lectured by my college friend, I'm thinking that 10 years age difference is probably too much for my tastes (not that it stopped my college friend whenshe got married).

I'm done with my service for the next six years, and when my time gets called in 2012, I'm hoping that they will have finally gotten rid of all the lawyers.