So, I was called for Jury Duty today in New Brunswick, NJ. Some people take pride in doing their civic duty. I am guessing that those people are the ones that actually have jobs that pay them for the time off and don’t have to work 2 jobs (like me) to pay the bills.

I’m a contractor. No vacation time, no sick time, nothing. If I don’t work, I don’t get any pay whatsoever.

But wait! We get paid for Jury Duty! …We get a whopping $5 per day from the court system. Whoop dee shit.

The system is so poorly explained and executed. The literature and websites for the court system don’t explain anything to you. The papers that they send you are so outdated they they tell you to go to an address that isn’t even being used anymore that has a taped-up sign on it with the real address. Can you bring a laptop*? A Nintendo DS? When is lunch? What actually happens? No one knows before the last second in the waiting room. I guess the literature was last printed before most people had laptops and…lunch.

I guess I should explain how the process works, since their website certainly doesn’t. First you watch a shitty film with 80s synth music that tries to brainwash you into thinking that this is awesome. This is necessary because a lot of us (like the kids who went to my public school) never were taught how this works. Since Americans hardly get any paid out of office time compared to everyone else in the world, this often fails miserably due to low morale.

Then you get called at random. (Lucky me was the second person called.) They make you line up and go into a room where you fill out a questionairre. Then they lecture you about how awesome this is. Then they interview every single person.

I was promptly disqualified because I can’t pay my bills and come here for the length of any of the trials that they had running today. Instead of doing the smart thing and letting me leave for the day, I had to sit for the whole day back in the coughing room even though there was no way they would pick me for a trial. I even got called again and sent back again. You can feasibly get called 3, 4, or 5 times.

Technically you can claim economic hardship and not come here in the first place, but the written requirements for this seem to be very large. I’d need to have kids or a house at stake. However, I think I will try to prove financial hardship next time if I still am a contractor. Who knows? Everything else these guys send you or have online is unclear and out of date. Maybe their current written requirements aren’t as difficult as they had shown when they chiseled their website upon limestone tablets.

Magazines and books are not allowed in the courtroom during jury screening, so they make you leave them on a communal table where anyone can grab them. This means that while you are waiting sometimes as long as an hour or more in a closed-off room, you are bored off of your ass.

Today has consisted of sitting in a dirty room with coughing people and being barked at by rude administrators just like High School. I also had to go through metal detectors just like High School.

It will take 4 weeks for me to get my $5.

Methinks this system is in dire need to streamlining. Cranky people do not generally end up doing good work. Judging by the amount of complaining and angry words that I heard flying around the waiting room, I think a different implementation would yield less crank-tastic results.

Honestly, if they paid us at least minimum wage to be there, I think most people would not mind so much. The problem is that today something like over 40% of us in the USA have no benefits or vacation time. It is the new trend for employers. I don’t think that these two systems work together very well.

*Laptops actually are kind of allowed, but must be locked up when you are called to be screened for jury candidacy. I know someone who had theirs stolen when they left it locked up. (Yes, I am braving Carpal iFinger and writing this on my iPhone because I didn’t dare bring one.)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under General, Oni's Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.