So, as I mentioned before, I reported for jury duty last Wednesday. After sitting around for most of the day, my number was called for a panel at around 2:35. I was asked to wait so that I could bring up our group's paperwork to the courtroom, and I did so. While I waited, I learned that nearly everyone--except one lucky guy--had been called from our jury room. Upon arriving upstairs, I saw the previous group still waiting in the hall--including the guy who had talked to me all morning and Mr. Ian Ziering.

We were asked to enter the courtroom about 20 minutes later, where we finally saw the judge, the district attorney, the defense attorney, the defendant, the bailiff, the court reporter, and the court clerk. After being sworn in, numbers were chosen for the jury box. Twenty people were chosen--and I was among them. Honestly, how come I never will any of the sweepstakes that I enter, but I seemed to "win" on this jury thing?

We had to answer several questions about ourselves, first asked by the judge and then the attorneys. It was a long process that lasted for the rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday. I found myself irritated because people kept feeling the need to answer every question by telling the judge how "important" their job was and how "inconvenient" this was to their life. The judge tried to explain to them that no one is any more important than any other and that everyone is inconvenienced by jury duty. But they felt the need to continue to waste time on it. Eventually, most of those people were let go, and we empanelled a jury at about 3:00 on Thursday afternoon. Then we spent a little over an hour choosing the 5 alternates.

These were sworn in on Friday morning, and we were finally off to the races. We heard the opening arguments and began to hear testimony from the first witness. Sometime in there we had lunch. I was asked to lunch by a couple of girls, and we walked to Starbucks in the heat. I had a sandwich and a tomato-mozzarella salad and an iced tea. Quite delicious. Oh, we also saw a guy that we THOUGHT was Steven Weber, the actor. Isn't L.A. great?

The afternoon was more of the same, until we were finally allowed to leave. *sigh*

Thoughts: 1) We are not allowed to talk about the case, but I am allowed to say that it is a murder case;
2) I missed Phil Specter walking up and down the hall sometime on Thursday. Bummer;
3) This case is expected to last 10 days, which I am NOT thrilled about;
4) People really shouldn't think that their lives are more important than others, because they're not.