Jury Duty

Okay, so let me tell you how much I hate jury duty.

I know that it's my duty as a citizen of my city/state/country to serve as needed. However, I am also quite absent-minded at times (my husband calls me a dingbat - he's sweet, no?). So the system they have here in my lovely county doesn't work for me. See, you have to call in every night, Sunday through Thursday, to see if you have to go in the following day.

This should be quite easy to remember, unless you're like me, the first time I got called for duty. At the time I was in my last semester of grad school and project leader for our final (thesis-like) project, which we did in groups. My group had all the commuters so dealing with them all, all of the time, was annoying to say the least. I was also working near-full-time. So, I forgot to call in the Wednesday night I was supposed to, and so therefore missed that I was supposed to go in the next day.

Oops.

So at around noon, when I remember that "shit, I was supposed to call in, and double shit, I got called to come in today", I drive (crying hysterically thinking I was going to get fined and/or put in jail because I'm always the one that gets made an example of) to the courthouse and plead my case.

The clerk was out for lunch.

So there I sat, trying not to cry in public, for 30 minutes waiting for her to come back. When she does, she says, "You could get in major trouble for this. You should have called in." I tell her I was in class until 10 pm the night before and so I forgot to call, she says "Well, you could have gotten out of jury duty for that if you had called before this week". Here's where I slap my forehead and plead ignorance.

She decided to be nice to me and give me a continuance until the week of July 4th (since I had to serve another whole week, she gave me a short one).

Guess what I did. I forgot to call Wednesday night. AGAIN. Luckily this time I didn't have to go in, and I made it through the whole week without getting called.

At this point, let me tell you that my husband has never so much as gotten a potential juror questionnaire.

So, after a lovely weekend this past weekend at my parents' house, we got home Sunday evening, and sat down to read the mail that had accumulated in our box while we were gone. I hear my husband say "Hmmm...this one's for you and it looks important".

You guessed it - a questionnaire for jury duty. Only this time it's for the Federal Circuit Court.

I am so screwed.