Jury don'ty

I had jury duty today. I'm pretty sure it's safe to tell you that, given what transpired.

6:30 am: Get up.

7:30 am: Start driving out to Rolling Meadows. Why the hell did I have to drive all the way to Rolling Meadows? Because apparently Cook County has some dividing line in the middle of the city (I've heard it's Roosevelt Road) and if you live anywhere in the county north of that, you can be assigned to any of the "northern" courts, which include the Daley Center, Skokie, and yes, Rolling Meadows. I wasn't the only person there from Chicago, either.

8:30 am: I-90 traffic cleared up after O'Hare and I ended up making reasonable time, so I was one of the first people there; in fact, the room wasn't even unlocked yet when I arrived. I went in, got my number, and sat down with "The Illustrated Pepys" (a book I must have gotten for some class in college that I ended up dropping, which I dug out of my room this morning while searching for something to take with me). By the way, Samuel Pepys? Kind of an asshole.

9:00 am: We watch a video clearly produced in the late 1980s (oh, the hair on those women) and starring Lester Holt (then an anchor for the local CBS News) as the token "local broadcast guy we hired to have someone who'd been in front of a camera before." Meanwhile, the first court call comes and goes with no court requesting jurors.

10:30 am: Second court call. No court requests jurors. There must have been a lot of guilty pleas going down today.

11:30 am: With an hour having passed since the second call and no juror requests, we are dismissed for lunch with instructions to be back by 1:30 for the third call. Yeah - after just three hours of sitting (less for those who didn't arrive early), it's a two-hour lunch break! I drive over to Randhurst and hit the food court; the mall was looking pretty dead (though of course it was noon on a Tuesday) and the food court was actually kind of crappy. I had lunch at an off-brand express Chinese place which made me understand why Panda Express is so popular. Also, I'm guessing that food court doesn't see a lot of action in more ways than one - there was still a large mall-stand poster up for In the Mix, the movie starring Usher which came out November 23. 2005. To complete the lunch break, I drove past the former spot of Twin Links, the preferred mini golf spot for Drew and me before it closed last August. It's now a spanking-new and as-yet-uninhabited medical office building. Sad.

12:30 pm: With nothing else to do, I cut the lunch break in half and go back to the jury room.

1:30 pm: Third and final court call. No courts request jurors.

2:30 pm: An hour having passed since the final call, it is assumed that no courts need jurors. We're given our $17.20 checks and released. Oddly, it ends up taking me longer to get home than it did to get in, due to traffic. Tired, I forego trying to make it in for a couple hours of work (I got paid not to go anyway).

And that's it! On the plus side, I got money (albeit a very tiny amount and it basically just covers transportation and lunch expenses when you get down to it) for doing nothing but reading and I got a random day off work, which honestly I kind of needed mentally right now. And I also won't have to get called again for at least a year, and usually it's more like every three years unless you're spectacularly unlucky.

In other news, Mother Nature apparently decided summer was over. We're into the "high 70, low 50" part of the year where it gets obnoxiously cold at night and never really warms up either. On the one hand, the apartment is finally cooling off; on the other hand, my room still turns into a furnace as soon as I close the door. Always a fun time.