So, this week I fulfilled my summons to be on the jury in the Cobb County Judicial system. Mostly, it involves sitting around in a room and reading a book. I was almost selected to be on a trial. The defendant decided to plea guilty, but then changed his mind at the last minute and wanted a trial when he found out what the punishment was, so we were summoned and lined up to go in the courtroom. However, the defendant changed his mind again and decided to plea guilty. So, no trial for us. The judge was very eloquent in his explanations to us. “In a company, you expect everything to operate efficently because everyone is going mostly in the same direction. In the court, you can expect everything to be inefficient because two groups are going in opposite directions.” In the end, it wasn’t so bad fulfilling my civic duty (and I made a couple bucks off of it, too.)
The upside of all of the waiting is that I knocked out about half of the Kierkegaard anthology that I bought and I got a good chance to listen to Derek Webb’s Mockingbird with a critical ear. Maybe I’ll have some more “literary” content to add to the site in the future.
Kierkegaard, eh? I like Kierkegaard a lot. His thoughts on the faith of Abraham were very insightful. The only “philosophy” books that I ever made it through were books by Kierkegaard. This was during my “trying to be intellectual” phase of my life. I have many books that I bought but never got through more than a few pages of. Oh, well. I guess I am just not very intellectual. 🙁
Good to hear from you, Jeff. You haven’t written much recently.
I’ve never quite understood why people seem to complain about jury duty. As long as you bring your book and iPod along to help prevent boredom… I served on a jury a couple of years ago for a really simple assault case that was a waste of time to try with a jury. Nonetheless, it gave me some feeling of civic pride to know that I had helped perpetuate our grand judicial system.
That being said, I can’t quite imagine getting stuck on a jury for a trial that was scheduled to last several weeks… maybe the intellectual part of my mind would enjoy the challenge, but somehow I’m thinking my employer wouldn’t be too happy about my absence.
So that’s where you’ve been, buddy. 🙂