I had always looked forward to jury duty, but the bureaucracy surrounding jury duty in San Francisco County has made me fairly cranky.
 
The way it works is this: you get a letter in the mail that tells you to call in at such-and-such a date. You call in and get a recording to call back again the next day. You do that. You get another recording that tells you to try the next day. You do that. Now, throughout this process you may be praying, please, just not on Wednesday. Any other day of the week, but don't make me come in on Wednesday because I'll have to miss my first day of winter class at Stanford ("lexical semantics" with Beth Levin). Naturally, you get called in and have to miss that day of class. Perfect.
 
So you go in and wait in the basement to be assigned to a courtroom. Your name is called with about 40 other people. If you're like me, you think, hey, everyone's crowding on to the elevator, I'll get up to the fifth floor first by taking the stairs.
 
So you try to find the stairs, but you can't. You ask the security guards and they tell you that it's a secure stairwell and you can't go up. So maybe at this point you pretend like you're claustrophobic and deathly afraid of elevators, even though you're not and this conversation is going to make it impossible for you to get to the courtroom first.
 
But, as the guards say no this isn't possible, you become more strident because what if you were claustrophobic. Can't they escort you up and down the stairs? Shouldn't they? Are they lazy. You're indignant. They refuse to cooperate. You huff away saying "This is unacceptable." (In the elevator you pretend to look nervous just in case they're watching the closed circuit video monitors that must be installed in the elevator car somewhere.)
 
You get to the courtroom but are at the end of the line. But everyone is straining to hear the clerk, who is inside, call people to go sit in the jurybox for voir dire (the lawyers select the jury by asking potential jurors whether or not they hate black people or love Bay Area Rapid Transit). Now, since you and most of the people are outside the courtroom, it would make more sense for the roly-poly pleasant clerk woman to come outside, instead everyone just strains to hear. After the jurybox is filled everyone else still enters the courtroom and has to pay attention, you just don't get to start off in the jurybox.
 
Then you wait for another roll call and get then the judge asks who would like to claim hardship (children who can't be taken care of, lost income that will really hurt, finals for students, unrefundable travel, etc). My favorite was Ms. Fairbanks who came after two gentlemen who couldn't afford to serve (by California law, employers have to let you serve, but they don't have to pay you while you do it). Ms. Fairbanks said, "Well, it doesn't sound like much of a hardship, but on Sunday I have a nonrefundable trip to Vale." Ms. Fairbanks looked like she (or some elderly relative) might own half of Vale. She did get excused (and will sit for a jury in March).
 
I got deferred, too, and will go back Aug 21st. I have a strange rage still in me about the elevator situation. I wonder if I'll be more convincing in August. Or if I'll have cooled off and just take the elevators like I usually do.