I got out of jury duty

On Monday I was assigned jury duty. I cleverly brought my laptop to do some work while waiting in the juror assembly room. Our jury room has both phone lines for dial-up and wireless internet access. San Francisco is good in that way.

Two hours later I was called up to a courtroom. They told us that the trial was expected to last six weeks. They began the session by asking if that was an unreasonable burden on anyone. People used two excuses mainly; either they had a medical condition or they were self-employed. I was amazed at the number of diabetics in the room. It's a very popular disease these days.

After much internal debate, I decided to ask to be let go. If I were full-time at my part-time university job, I would have signed up in a second. They pay for (I think) unlimited jury duty time, so it would be six weeks of not being at the office. Sounds great.

But the other 60 or so hours a week that I work are freelancing, and to have 20 less of those hours for six weeks would be pretty rough. I told the judge that though I have a part-time job, I'm primarily self-employed. I didn't think they would release me, but they did.

I was out of there by 11:30. This means that I worked for two hours in the juror assembly room that I would have normally had to spend at my day job, and only had to do one hour of service. So I ended up getting paid from my day job to work for two hours at writing.

Jury duty rocks!