One month ago I had the honor of going to Jury duty-the one obligation we as citizens all have. I got to the courthouse at 9am and sat down with the other jurors.
The room was a big open space and must have filled with 300 other juror’s littered form all different walks of life. From bikers to bankers, everyone was represented.
The problem started when I got there- I sat down and waited and waited and waited… up until 10:30 am when they announced the first group that had to go to the courtroom to hear a case.
In total about 65 people were summoned with the rest left to wait. This procedure took about 5 minutes with the majority of people still left for the next call, which never came.
By 11:30- the crowd in the pen area got restless and we were let go to have an extended lunch. Remember lunch is sacred in any government building - so the government employees would rather cut the work short then rather risk having it cut into lunch hour.
By the time I came back at 1:00- the area was filled back with all the jurors where we proceeded to wait again until our names got called, the next time being 3:00pm.
Finally I made it! I had been called only to go to another room to wait some more. We entered a courtroom and were met by the court reporter and the Judge who proceeded to give us our standing orders. The primary one being if there were any potential conflicts of time for serving on the case, these potential jurors should approach the bench. This elicited about 60% of our group who wanted to get out of jury duty.
The jurors approached the bench one by one and pleaded their case. This time consuming event took up the rest of the day and by 4:45 the judge let the rest of the group go. Feeling that we were so close to 5:00 pm anyway we should all be sent home only to return the next day.
In the next post- I will tell you what happened on day 2 and 3.
There are a couple of thing to take away from this little experience.
First off -when you walk into one of these court houses I noticed that they are filled with Police Officers, Judges, Clerks, Office Workers, etc. There are a lot of people working that are all being paid by taxpayers.
I can guarantee you if this was a private company, there would be 1/2 the people doing twice the work and it would run on time.
In addition these people all will have short careers because after 20 years these government employees will have enough time in to retire- and the taxpayer will be footing the bill over the life of all these employees.
The scary thing is that is just one city in one state. This is taking place all over the country. So the next time you hear that the government wants to raise your taxes begin to realize where your money is being spent.
Be aware some percentage of your money is being spent on people who never had to work that hard in the first place.