Jury Service

I've never live blogged before because, well, I'm always home. And, come to think of it, I usually talk about my kids and home and things relating to my home, so I guess that's live blogging, right?

I'm blogging today from the Milwaukee County Courthouse. I'm sitting in the jury pool room waiting to be called for possible service. I'm surrounded by chatting jurors and jurors reading John Grisham and People magazine and jurors playing cards. Anxious jurors , happy jurors and bored jurors; they're all here. In the meantime I wait. And wait. And wait some more.

During our orientation we were thanked numerous times for our service and the sacrifice of our time. I kept wondering why they were bothering to thank us; it's not like any of us chose to be here.

In any event, here I am. Performing my civic duty instead of preparing to board a flight for New York City. What a kind and generous citizen I am.

Jury Duty

Shortly following Elisabeth's birth I was summoned for jury duty. Milwaukee County offers its jurors one six month deferment if they're unable to serve at the requested time. Having a newborn, exclusively breastfed baby I immediately realized I would be unable to serve at the requested time in January of 2006 or six months from then. On the advice of my in-house counsel I took Elisabeth with me, diaper bag, car carrier and all with the hope of being excused.

I never made it into the courtroom. After arriving at the courthouse the clerk in charge of checking the jurors in looked disdainfully down at Elisabeth and sneered, "What is that?!" I explained my predicament but the impatient woman clearly wasn't interested. She'd heard too many excuses from prospective jurors wishing to escape their civic duty, I suppose. Thankfully, the chief judge (is that what the head county judges are called? You'd think I'd know that, being married to an attorney that practices in that courthouse and all) Kitty Brennan was much more understanding in her response to me after I mailed her a letter summarizing my predicament. She postponed my summons for a two year span which, I understood to mean, I'd be summoned again in January of 2008.

Well, I got the summons and it's not for January of 2008. It's December of 2007-- right before Christmas. Ugh! All I can say is for once in my life procrastination has paid off because Superdad will be in New York during the time I'm expected to serve and I was planning on going with him, I just hadn't bought my plane ticket yet. Whew! At least now the Milwaukee County justice system won't deprive me of the cost of an airline ticket.

At this point I see little hope of being excused from serving. I'll play all my cards; my husband is a litigator, I'm a primary caregiver for our three children, we home school, for Pete's sake. But when it's all said and done I have a bad, bad feeling.