If there is one thing that really annoys me, it is Jury Duty. The pay is really low depending on how many days you are stuck serving on the jury. You must be at the court house by nine in the morning each time you are called. Then there is the fact that you have to stay there even if they don’t need you there due to the fact that they came to a settlement.
If you are stuck at the court house for one to two days, you only get ten dollars for each day, obviously not enough to make up the loss in pay that you have to take for missing work, unless you use a pay day off. But if you serve on a case that lasts three or more days, you get twenty five dollars a day on the third day and each day after that. But even with the raise in pay, you still lose money if you are not taking a paid day off, so if you worked a job that pays thirty dollars a day and you serve jury duty for three days, all the while you are not taking any paid days off, you make forty-five dollars when you could have made ninety. At the same time if you do take a paid day off, you make the ninety dollars as well as the forty-five dollars but you lost three paid days off, so you have to ask yourself was it worth it? But what if you don’t have any paid days off, then you must take a day off without pay. So let’s use the same job as another example, you make forty-five dollars when you could have made ninety, so you lose forty-five dollars.
There is also the case of making the jury members show up at nine in the morning when they don’t even show up till a half hour to forty-five minutes later. It is sweet that they have a café in the basement, even if it has a cheesy name, so those who arrive at the court house early can get some breakfast. Then there is the fact that they leave the jury for hours while we wait for them to return. The only things we could do were walk around the basement, just the area that connects to the café, and watch Planet Earth. And the thing that made matters worse, they only gave us one DVD of it so when that was over, we had nothing.
The last thing that drives me crazy about jury duty is that they do not inform you of what the suspect did until they figure out whether or not they will need a jury. In my experience, we waited from nine in the morning to twelve just to be told that they came to a settlement and will not need us. They at least gave us the privilege of knowing what the suspect did, in my case, she illegally discharged a firearm.

That is what irritates me about Jury duty. Why do they need people to show up at nine in the morning, and they don’t even provide a free breakfast. And they need more DVD’s to play while everyone is stuck in the basement waiting on them. And they should allow people to leave if they don’t need us.