Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Jury duty post
doing my civic duty today for multnomah county. some early observations on fellow portlanders:

a. we're not confrontational enough. a woman in my row was talking and snort-laughing on her cell for about 15 minutes and instead of someone asking her to quiet down, they all just moved.

b. similar to above- there is a big tv up front. someone turned it on to the olympics which is cool and would appeal to most people. then some young guy went up and had the balls to change the channel to jerry falwell. he asked and no-one objected, but after the change, there were a ton of groans. I just laughed

(currently listening to "steve mcqueen" by the drive by truckers)

c. out of about 30 people, I count the following: 4 sleepers, 8 ipods, 7 trashy gossip magazines, 1 bible, 1 very loud shirt (i will try and capture it)

well, back to my book.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

man, your (a) is dead on. we went to the movies long ago and all kinds of people were talking throughout it. since the movie was crap, we didn't get offended for a while, but when it got out of hand, amy finally told them (nicely) to be quiet-- and then some dude in the row ahead of us turned around and said "thank you" to her! but he couldn't have told them to shut up himself, oh, no....
hope you're having fun down there.

Anonymous said...

I identify with all your observations.

My sojourn on Jury Duty came in early November 2005. I was amazed at the number of folks in the "pool." Likewise, the cell-phone junkies were amongst us all. It was obvious which ones were "I'm talking very important business" talkers in contrast to the mindless talkers.

However, I was called to a courtroom about 10 am and was subsequently seated on a jury for a 2-day trial.

After we reached our verdict on the second afternoon, I have to say that the jury was made-up of folks who treated the whole experience with thought, care and respect for the process.

Once we'd submitted out verdict form, we were still locked-in for lunch. We were then free to dialogue about the posturing of the lawyers, the judge's directives, the clerk's behavior, and our impressions of the entire experience.
'Twas very educational.

Rigo said...

I would have said something. I don't think I'm confrontational but if you bug me I'm letting you know, especially if you put on Jerry Falwell!

MikeyPDX said...

Funny about the TV...something similar happened when I was on jury duty.

My only regret about the experience was that my PSP battery died. I actually had to talk to people to avoid being bored silly.

Is it ironic that I was playing Grand Theft Auto while waiting to be selected?

geeekgirl said...

When I had jury duty a few months back there were several sniffling sick people, and one black person. Out of a hundred or more people, only one black person!

WTF?

Oregon is way too white for this white girl.