Jury Duty is one of those things that always pops up out of nowhere. You wake up one day, calmly going through your inexorable march to the grave, and boom! there’s a letter from the county or the state or some sort of underground Thunderdome: You’ve got the duty.
I’ve never minded getting jury duty and never made much effort to wriggle out of it, yet I’ve only served on one jury in my life. It was a difficult case and all the jurors worked really hard on getting it right, and frankly the experience made even my cold, blackened heart swell up a little bit. I didn’t love every single person I served with, but we all did our best and that’s what matters.
So when I got my summons again a few weeks ago, I was sanguine about it, especially because the most irritating aspect of jury duty had been changed by the pandemic: In-person service. Instead of schlepping to the county courthouse every day, I could report for jury duty remotely using everybody’s favorite torture device: Zoom. This also meant that instead of trying to push and shove a bunch of other people out of the way to take possession of the one table in the jury room that gets decent WiFi, I could just sit at home with no pants on and work off-screen.
Naturally, being me, this led to a series of humiliations.
Humiliation #1: Bubbs
I don’t actually use Zoom for video very often. In my secret identity as a freelance writer, I do a lot of interviews and people are always, always showing up on video and always, always expressing surprise when I don’t. Video is pretty useless for that stuff, though — I can see where a team dynamic might benefit from some video action, but for a one-off interaction only sociopaths want to use video.
At some point I set up my Zoom name as “Bubbs.” I don’t know why. I have no memory of this. But when I logged onto the court’s Zoom meeting, I showed up as Bubbs and did not immediately notice, which led to the Court Clerk shouting “HEY BUBBS WHAT IS YOUR ACTUAL NAME CAN YOU CHANGE IT PLEASE?”
Worse, every time I logged in or out of a meeting or breakout room, my name changed back to Bubbs, and I would get shouted at again. I figured this coupled with my inelegant reaction (diving across the desk and slapping madly at my keyboard while making the classic Jeff Somers oh shit face) would pretty much guarantee I didn’t get picked for any sane jury. If the attorneys organized the potential jurors in different categories ranging from ACCEPTABLE AS EMPANELED to IMMEDIATELY CHALLENGE, I figured I was in the WACKADOODLE tranche.
Humiliation #2: Prince Harry, First of His Name.
I have cats. Boy howdy, do I have cats. Now, a sane man would have closed a door and kept his cats far away from the magical jury duty portal, but I have never been a sane man. So, yes, at several imes during the approximately 678 hours I was sitting on a Zoom meeting listening to the judge ask potential jurors the same 15 questions over and over again a cat decided it was a good time to stick its butt in the camera.
At several points during jury duty, my cat Harry decided to climb me like a tree and drape himself majestically across my shoulders. This left me with a choice between leaving him be and appearing to be an eccentric old man who wore living animals as clothing like some sort of off-putting Disney villain, or awkwardly remove a cat from my person, which would undoubtedly result in video of me being scratched to death while whimpering “Please Prince Harry, that hurts!” being uploaded to Youtube and becoming a sensation.
After all that, I didn’t even get questioned. Not simply not questioned — I never even got to answer the surprisingly long list of questions the judge had for all of us. Against all odds, they actually found eight jurors in record time, and while a few people were excused for cause, for the most part people seemed happy to serve.
Which was refreshing. Although now I’m pretty sure there are videos of me with a cat on my shoulder staring off blankly into space, although to be fair the fact it took this long for that to happen is kind of surprising.