Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

This week I had the privilege of serving as a jury member. I took a small notebook with me and recorded my thoughts through both days, as time allowed1. Below you will find a copy of those notes I took to read or ignore as you choose. No real attempt has been made to make the notes any better than they were originally written.

~~~~~~~~~~

Slept poorly, slow to awaken.
Rush to courthouse for jury duty. Hallways packed and warm.
Waited in courtroom in chairs of oak & iron. Old, lovely and totally uncomfortable.
Surrounded by young pups to old farts. By ladies of brown hair to blue.

Ate a granola bar on the drive in, carrying a second one in my pocket.
Drank some tea, but left bottle in the car.
Still we wait…

Hats removed from heads upon request. People go quiet.
A sense of beginning flows over the room. But is lost as the court assistant leaves.
A man, looking grumpy, leaves for second time. A cellphone rings when it should be turned off.
The doors close and the murmuring gets louder. People start to quiet again.
Expectation, boredom, sleepiness & muffled laughter sweep the room.
And still we wait…

I look around the room and wonder what kind of person would have all these people as their peers?
What could they be accused of?
And still we wait…

Housekeeping is done.
To clerk of court must report to get proof of attendance.
Educational video is watched.
The video’s attempts at humor failed.
Brains leaked from ears as video bored us to tears.
Some slackers walked in late.
And still we wait…

The video completed.
A break was announced.
And still we wait…

Break concluded.
Lawyers at their desk.
Perhaps now we will progress.

In truth the break runs long.
And still we wait…

A man with white hair sets a laptop on the judge’s bench.
Is he the decider of fates or an IT flunky like me?
A pool of potential jurors gets taken across the hall.
And still we wait…

The lawyers get called behind closed doors.
Yet a man waits across the fence where they say.
Casually dressed, I like his shirt.
Defendant, plaintiff, which is he?
I know not.
And still we wait…

Pages rustle, laptops beep, people babble.
And still we wait…

More names get called and the herd thins.
But still we wait…

Both lawyers finally return
But still we wait…

A book of haiku
waits at home wishing
it were here.

But still we wait…

Glasses removed for cleaning
Room all a blur
From poor eyesight & action not
And still we wait…

Lawyers conferring
whispers unheard
Doors a closing
And still we wait…

White haired man returns
In robes, a judge he is.
Waiting is done for now.

Into jury box, I go.
Questions are asked and answered.
Recommended Woodchuck Hard Cider I do.
Questions on alcohol use are frequent, as the case deals with OWI2.
Then a break we take.
And still we wait…

Back in we go.
Strike one, strike two…. strike eight.
Into the the final 13 for me.

Opening statements are made.
Prosecutor’s are long and dry.
Defender’s are short and sweet.

Now it’s time to eat!

Quizno’s my lunch did cook.
Then I bought some comic books.

And now we have to wait
Till we return to decide
One man’s fate.

Prosecutor shows videos and questions witness.
Defender tries to discredit both.
State rests and court adjourns.

~~~~~~~~~~

Day 2

Defender calls defendant to the stand.
Claims it’s all lies and the videos were faked.

Prosecutor calls the actor from the videos to the stand.
Voices were not a match, though their builds were vaguely similar.
Both sides done presenting.
Now with the judge they are blathering.
And we wait…

~~~~~~~~~~

There was more to tell, but that’s all I recorded in my notebook. In the end, well… that’s all a matter of public record. Go look it up. I will only admit to the follow:

  • I got a nice lunch on the court’s dime the second day
  • Now I don’t have to serve at the county courthouse for a couple of years.
  • It was nice to be out my office.

1 I used the official notepad for taking notes on the case, which the court kept to be destroyed after my service was completed.
2 As in operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

Even though I run multiple plugins to block comment spam; some still makes it into my moderation queue. Mostly it’s annoying and boring, but this bit cracked me up.

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.

If you don’t also find this amusing, then I probably just need more caffeine this morning. 🙂

Update 2006-09-13: Oddly enough, this post is suddenly get hit with all kinds of comment spam that actually makes it past my filters and into the comment moderation queue. As such, I’m here by closing comments on this post.

Unlike the majority of Amercians, I did not head back to the office after the Memorial day weekend. Well, not back to my office anyways. Instead, I whipped out my interview suit1 and went to a job interview. It was a really good thing that I left early to get there as I got slightly lost. I stopped at a coffee shop and got directions. Yes ladies, men can and will ask for directions when we know we’re lost2.

After getting the directions sorted out (I missed overshot the street I needed to turn onto by 1 block), I arrived at the company’s office3. The building looked surprisingly new, though it was a bit warm inside. Though that could have been a combination of me being nervous and me having “suited up”. I had to fill out some paperwork (boilerplate HR background check authorization forms) and then waited a bit for my interview. Shortly, my interviewer showed up and took me back to his office. We went over my resume a bit, though it turned out his copy of my resume was missing the information about me being a UofI graduate. Fortunately, I had prepared for that eventuality by having multiple copies of my most current and most generic4 and I gave one of these copies to him. We discussed what sorts of things I do for my current employer, what I did during my college days and so forth.

But we also got off topic several times dicussing a variety of side issues: my Japan trip, Mindbridge, working for companies who close their local offices, being a non-traditional college student and so on. While I do not have an overbudence of interviews under my belt; this one felt like it went extremely well. I really felt like I made a connection with the interviewer5. As it turns out, the company is looking for 1 person for their computer operations department and 1 for their data warehouse. According the interviewer, the operations position is a bit lower than what I’m really looking for in a starting salary but he thinks I could be a good fit for the other position as well. He went on to say the company really needs to get these positions filled quickly before their busy season hits and I should hear something back in a couple of weeks.

Since the interview went so well and the only reason I was on time for it was the helpful coffee shop; I went back to have myself a little snack6. The shop is called the “Coffee Talk Cafe”. When I got there after my interview, the only people in it were the staff. The lady behind the counter was very friendly and we chatted for a bit. She wished me all kinds of good luck on my interview, while she rang me up. I got a toffee nut latte and a orange/pineapple muffin. I ate in the shop and so they nuked up the muffin, putting a little butter on top. It was divine. Yum, yum. *smile* It took them a little bit to make the latte and when the lady brought it over we chatted a bit more. Apparently, I resemble the lady’s brother and in my suit look very “professor-ish”. I left a little bit after that and am now home chilling out. I’ll br browsing the online want ads in a little bit (looking for other nibbles) but right now I feel really good about today and the interview I had.

1 Okay, it’s really my only suit.
2 We just don’t think we’re as lost as you think we do.
3 Per my long standing habit, I will not be discussing who they were.
4 Given time and available brainpower, I prefer to customize my resume for the company & job I am applying for.
5 Did I mention this person is also the hiring manager? Oh well if I hadn’t yet; I have now.
6 To be prefectly honest, this was my breakfast. I was feeling too nervous prior to the interview to want to eat anything.

Towel Day Self Portait

If so, you better have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not familiar, Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of our time. He wrote a wonderful series of radio plays which were converted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to create Towel Day as a tribute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more precise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecommuting to work today had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. *grin*

I mentioned a short while back that I’m back on the meat market looking for a new job. Well, today over lunch I got my first nibble. I’ll post more info some other time, but it felt really good to finally have somebody show some interest in me. Until today, the only other reply I’d gotten was a formletter telling me they weren’t interested.