I pulled the envelope from my mailbox with a mixture of anticipation and dread, already knowing what it would contain from the bright blue lettering on the front: Jury Duty Summons.
I'd already postponed once, and scoured the list of reasons one could be excused, but I qualified for none of them.
It looked like it was my turn to serve my time in the great cubicle in the courthouse.
Jury duty is a rare universal experience.
No matter our roles in everyday life, whether we spend our usual weekdays sitting at a desk, driving a truck, or curing patients, with few exceptions when it's our turn, we have no choice but to report to the courthouse, and wait to see if we'll be chosen to sit on a jury.
Talking over my impending time of servitude with my co-workers, I realized that different people approach the experience very differently.
Just as some people dread each work day, so do many people see jury duty as an inconvenience, a burden, something to be avoided at all costs, or at least contained to as little time as possible.
In contrast, others look forward to jury duty, and see it as an opportunity, either to exercise a sense of civic pride, or simply to avoid their day job, even for just a few hours.
I fell into neither of these camps, but approached jury duty with great ambivalence; it was something that everyone takes a turn at, so I figured it could only be so bad, but I wasn't all that excited either.
Both times I had been called in the past, I'd sat in the waiting room for a few hours, got a little bit of reading done, and then been dismissed.
But this time, much to my surprise, shortly after lunch I suddenly found myself seated on a jury for a criminal trial.
The next few days were a surreal experience, ranging from the excruciatingly boring to extremely fascinating, while at other points bordering on the absurd. There were moments I felt I was in a scene from a Dennis Lehane novel, while other times I felt I was stuck inside an episode of a television sitcom, something like The Office: Jury Duty Edition.
The case before us was a serious affair. The defendant barely looked old enough for high school, but the evidence included a gun, and no fewer than four Boston cops and a fingerprint witness testified.
My fellow jurors approached the task ahead of them with solemnity and a sense of responsibility.
Even so, they seemed utterly incapable of following the rules or listening to directions.
In a courtroom, the judge is the boss, and whatever he says, goes. Yet during the 2 1/2-day trial, no fewer than four of the jurors had to be reprimanded by the judge for not following his explicit instructions. One took notes, one loudly unwrapped food and tried to eat a snack, one insisted on making comments to the man sitting next to him, and another repeatedly forgot that we weren't supposed to talk to each other about the facts of the case.
Even so, these were the people who were charged with deciding the young defendant's guilt or innocence.
As much as I was horrified by the prospect of these people holding someone's future in their hands, in just the half of a week that we spent together, we developed a kind of camaraderie, and routine.
We sat in the same seats each day in the break room, and we learned what everyone's names are and what each of our roles are in the real world outside of the courthouse.
We watched the progress one woman made on an afghan she was knitting, and they joked about my speedy progress through a book I was reading during breaks.
At the end of the ordeal, I was chosen to be an alternate, which meant that after sitting through the trial, I didn't get to vote on the verdict.
My fellow jurors found the defendant innocent, and as we filed back into the break room for a final time, I thought to myself that I would miss the experience.
After only a couple of days I had gotten used to my fellow jurors, and to traveling downtown to report to the courthouse in the morning.
But then the judge came in to thank us for our time.
One of my fellow jurors insisted on telling the judge that she had decided he was a dead-ringer for one of the judges with a daytime television show, and another asked him if it was OK to contact the prosecutor's office with constructive criticism.
I decided maybe it was time to return to my real job, commute, co-workers, and boss, after all.
