Time Off in Purgatory

That's what you get for jury duty. I'm sitting in the jury assembly room on the 11th floor of the criminal courts building at Temple and Broadway in downtown L.A.

The room has some of the same aesthetics of an airport waiting room, and you have to go through the same security procedures (except at court they don't make you take off your shoes) and the environment is just as stultifyingly boring.

I took the online orientation program last week, so I was able to arrive around 9:30 instead of 8 o'clock; that was nice. But if you've already seen the boring how-to videos about justice online, you show up, they log you in and then you sit. And wait. And wait.

Around 10:30 they called one jury panel and sent them up to department 117. Then nothing until just before noon, when we were released for lunch. I went directly down to the cafeteria, since I don't feel like going down to the L.A. center across from the federal courts building and fighting the hords at the various fast-food places there. And, too, it's amazing that a cafeteria can cook turkey and make it come out looking like pulled pork and tasting like nothing much other than edible. The corn was even less tasty ... or more tasteless, I'm not sure which.

So I'm secretly hoping that I'll just spend the rest of the afternoon here, not get called out, and have my jury duty done with. Part of me would like to be empaneled and sit on a jury, now that I have the time to, but I also feel like I should get back to my studies and job search.

Speaking of studies, Steve and I went down to Vroman's Books (our local nonfranchise book store) and I picked up a book on ActionScript 3.0, since I wasn't having too much success with the online tutorials alone. It is obviously one of those subjects that has an "aha" factor to it: You kind of go along, not really understanding the meat of the subject, and then -- AHA -- things gel and you understand what's going on.

That's about it. Lunch break is almost over and they might be asking me to go do something semiproductive, so I should sign off. I think I have just enough time to upload the picture I took this morning with my iPhone, showing the enthusiastic citizen-jurors waiting for their chance to take a role in this system we call judicial.