{"id":256,"date":"2006-04-27T15:10:11","date_gmt":"2006-04-27T22:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/main\/2006\/04\/jury-duty\/"},"modified":"2013-02-23T06:01:30","modified_gmt":"2013-02-23T06:01:30","slug":"jury-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/2006\/04\/27\/jury-duty\/","title":{"rendered":"Jury Duty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I got an official-looking, strangely folded and sealed bit of heavy paper from what I assume was some portion of the county&#8217;s governing body.<\/p>\n<p>This did not do good things for my health.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI&#8217;d never seen anything like it before, and I really wasn&#8217;t sure what the hell I was supposed to do with it&#8230;except maybe try to read it and wonder which part came next, because government papers are really, really not laid out well.<\/p>\n<p>What I managed to figure out was that I was expected to report for jury duty at some point [the date was nearly impossible to find], and that Colorado doesn&#8217;t allow people to get out of jury duty based on work status [employed or un-], financial issues, transportation issues, age, or whatever.  You can ask them to reschedule you, but you only get one of those.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;but there are ways to be disqualified.  And there&#8217;s a website.  With an email address where you can ask questions.<\/p>\n<p>As soon as I was done inhaling various pills to solve all the digestive problems that developed a few minutes before I figured out what was going on, I sent off an email asking about the disqualification process.  Because, you see, I&#8217;m not fit to even be selected to be selected for jury duty, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my head does a lovely impression of that &#8216;cyclic&#8217; big bang\/big crunch shit on a more-than-regular basis [especially when the sun and fluorescent lights are involved].<\/p>\n<p>See, I really don&#8217;t&#8230;play well with others, to put it nicely.  It&#8217;s one of those things the military gave me &#8212; one of the unadvertised benefits of the Army.  Training, housing, pay, health care and a certain number of lucky volunteers get a free mental problem or two.<\/p>\n<p>So, I email.  And I get anxiety all over everything.  And I wait.  And I call my doctor at some point while I&#8217;m waiting for a response to my email.<\/p>\n<p>And I wait.<\/p>\n<p>I get a response to the email first, letting me know that I can indeed be disqualified, but I&#8217;ll need to send in a note from my doctor, and they&#8217;ll accept it up to two weeks after my reporting date.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t make me feel any better.<\/p>\n<p>I talk to my doctor, and she says she&#8217;ll write a letter for me, and that if I don&#8217;t see the letter in about three weeks, I should probably call her back, because maybe she forgot.  Because she&#8217;s really, really busy, and only works on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.<\/p>\n<p>I still don&#8217;t feel better, but I kinda manage to forget about it for a little while.<\/p>\n<p>Last Friday, I come home from a visit to an entirely different doctor [which probably deserves its own post], and find the letter waiting for me.<\/p>\n<p>My doctor says that I don&#8217;t like people, and that I really wouldn&#8217;t be suited for the jury selection process, much less jury duty.  And a bunch of other stuff.<\/p>\n<p>I spend the next twenty-four hours in a bit of a panic, because I can&#8217;t find the damned piece of paper that started all this shit.<\/p>\n<p>I eventually found the thing, filled out the stupid form, gave them a number where they could reach my doctor if they had any more questions, and mailed it to the address I got in the email.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, I got a little blue card in the mail that I&#8217;m probably going to have to keep track of for quite a while.  It&#8217;s a very important little blue card, I suspect, because it says that my medical exemption is on file in their office, and that if I&#8217;m ever summoned again, I should get in touch with them and remind them about it.<\/p>\n<p>All that means that I no longer have jury duty, which is a good thing.<\/p>\n<p>But I still don&#8217;t feel better about it.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I got an official-looking, strangely folded and sealed bit of heavy paper from what I assume was some portion of the county&#8217;s governing body. This did not do good things for my health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bib"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3bMfN-48","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2018,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coffeechick.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}