Poor Chuck! He’s suffering under a myriad of deadlines: a big website redesign, a catalog update, and he’s about to start teaching a series of classes in Northern California. At this inopportune time, he gets his jury duty summons. It’s the call-in kind, and when he called Sunday night, he didn’t have to report. Called Monday, free again. Called Tuesday, free yet again. He began to get a little cocky, thinking he might dodge the bullet altogether. No such luck. He called last night, and had to report today. Too bad! He’s out of deferments, so he went in today armed with plane reservations and conference invitations as proof of his inability to serve byond tomorrow (I learned that from my last experience – if you claim a conflict, you’d better be prepared to prove it – good excuses are getting pretty hard to come by). What I don’t get about the jury process is: how come we the jurors end up feeling like the criminals, stuck in rooms, at the mercy of civil servants who seem to get a real kick out of making us feel pretty similar to cattle in a pen? Okay, I get the civic duty thing, but we shouldn’t have endure all the inconveniences of the current system. If we can do traffic school online, why not virtual jury duty? I’d be happy to join, using my iSight camera, a virtual jury pool. Or one day and you’re out. And if we go that far, we should have a new rule that says no trial can last longer than one day (hey, so the lawyers just have to talk a bit faster!). Or how about professional jurors (a la the “silent witnesses” of Stranger in a Strange Land)? Oh well, for the moment, he’s stuck downtown, waiting…and waiting….and waiting.