Jury Duty, a Laptop, and a Firefly

Multnomah County decided in its infinite wisdom that it was time for me to do my civic duty. Consequently, I found myself sitting in the jury room of the county courthouse at 8am this morning. Fine. My employer pays me when on jury duty, so it's no great imposition. It is, however, excruciatingly boring sitting in the room with a couple hundred perfect strangers with nothing to do but wait for a judge to ask for a jury.

The last time I was called, two years ago, we were called to serve for a week at a time. Back then they had no way for any of us to hook up a laptop or anything, so I ended up doing a lot of reading and quietly pounding my head on the wall out of sheer boredom.

This time there were three critical differences. One, they only require us to show up for a single day (woohoo!). Two, they set up the jury room with some basic laptop-friendly amenities - namely network access and a wireless access point. Three, I came prepared this time: laptop, wireless card, and the DVDs for Firefly (loaned to me by a friend to whom I will be eternally grateful).

By far the first reason is the most important. But the third proved to make what could have been an excruciatingly long day pass relatively quickly. Hell, I even managed to reboot a misbehaving server between episodes.

And, as usual, my name was never even called. The only judge I saw was the one who comes in at the beginning of the day and gives us the little introductory pep-talk.