Civic Engineering

I have been a most excellent citizen in the past two days.

On the first day, I went to the high school gymnasium to vote on whether or not the town should build a new high school. Civic duty accomplished.

While I was there, I realized once again how small of a town I live in. This was the biggest deal that I have ever seen in our local town system. Ever. The turnout rate for this might have been bigger than we had for the presidential elections. People were standing by the roads with signs and there were cars decked out in "Vote Yes" or "Vote No" banners.

Not only was there a great deal of "spirit" for this, but it occured to me that in order to cast your ballot, you were not required to provide ID - all you had to do was state the street that you lived on and your name. They found your name on the list and gave you your ballot. Small town? Yeah.

The very next day I was summoned to jury duty. I had never been before, and the trip to the new courthouse in my county was an interesting experience.

My mom did a test drive with me the day before because I could probably manage to get lost even with a GPS. It was very helpful and I felt confident that the next morning at 6:45 I could find my way there.

I did arrive safely at the parking garage - a little frazzled because of the insane amount of commuter traffic, but safe nonetheless - and I proceeded to make my way up to the second floor to find a parking space.

I drove around, growing more and more anxious because I couldn't find a single open parking space. I drove past a set of reserved parking spaces, and then noticed another set of them when I drove around some more. And then I realized that the cars looked exactly the same after the third time that I drove around. In fact, they were the same.

I had been driving around in circles for the whole time.

Naturally, since it was 7:15 in the morning and I was a little stressed and overtired, I did not realize this until I had been driving around for ten minutes. Thankfully up on the fourth floor, there were some very spacious parking spaces, and I parked my car and walked over to the courthouse.

Once there, my bag had to be screened and as I waited, I heard one of the officers telling another woman where the room was for jury duty. Once I realized this common bond, this woman and I began chatting. I must have a complex with my age, because somehow within the first three minutes of meeting this woman I felt it necessary to slip into the conversation that I was in fact 21.

Up in the jury room, I handed in my questionnaire, got a number and sat down in a cushy seat amongst fifty other people. It reminded me of a combination between a classroom and an airplane. It was set up like a classroom - with the court officer being the teacher who told us what to do and had us watch an educational video about the court system. It was like an airplane because we didn't have an assignment, and we could talk to the random person who was sitting next to us if we wanted. Granted, nobody started talking until 10:00 (you know, once everyone had been awake for a while). At 7:30 in the morning, the room had been completely silent.

We sat there. And sat. And sat some more. I knew that eventually she would call a group to go and be interviewed, but that time never came, and it was getting close to noon, which was an hour away from when I knew that they would let us go. Eventually the judge came out. Apparently the cases that they had on the schedule for that day plead out, and they didn't need jurers anyway. Needless to say, we were useless. However, they made it sound as if we had put this man away anyways even though we hadn't done anything. Well, I guess we did do something. We did sit in a room for four hours listening to the random guy in the back complain about how he couldn't have his cigarettes. We did do that.