The way this place works is that we sit all day in a big, comfortable room waiting to be called. "We" is me and maybe 200 people who either weren't able to get out of jury duty or didn't want to. I'm not quite sure which of those I am.
Every time a courtroom in this building is ready to impanel a jury, the folks who run this department have a computer here select 35 or 40 of us at random and those folks are dispatched to that courtroom to be quizzed as potential jurors. Whoever is accepted becomes the jury for that trial for however many days it may last. Those who are rejected traipse back to this room and await the next lottery.
This is, I think, my fifth stint on jury duty. I have never been dispatched to any courtroom to be interviewed. Wasn't the last four times. Wasn't the one time they sent some of us up this morning. And now it's just past 2:45.
At noon, we were released for lunch and told to be back at 1:30. I walked out of the courthouse, hopped on a Dash bus and six minutes later, I was at Philippe the Original ordering one of their world-famous double-dipped French Dip sandwiches and a sack o' chips. There is no finer lunch in this hemisphere.
And now I sit here, presumably because there's at least one case going on in this building that might be ready to start the process of seating a jury in the next 60-90 minutes. If not, we all get released and our jury service is done…for this time. Stay tuned.