When It Comes to Jury Duty, They Also Serve Who Only Wait

There is good news this morning.

Jury service can be survived!

I did it. I have just completed 10 days of involuntary (but not unpleasant) servitude to the justice system of San Diego County. The venue: the Vista courthouse.

I offer no epiphanies. Just a pointillist patch of mixed images.

Like the fellow in snakeskin boots and fly-away hair who stood outside the courthouse and bawled out a message about God and extraterrestrials. Or the juror who spent his lunch hour playing video games.

Reading Barbara Cartland novels seems to enhance your chances of being picked for a jury. Reading J.R.R. Tolkien seems to doom you.

I read Larry McMurtry and didn’t get picked. In a system that wants people without hot-button attitudes, a newspaper columnist is odd man out.

A (small) conclusion: Some people fudge just a smidge when answering questions in court.

One prospective juror said that a hospital had misdiagnosed his cancer as inoperable. (He got a second opinion.) He then told the judge he’d have no trouble being fair to the same hospital in a malpractice case.

Not that candor is dead. One would-be juror, in a wife-beating case, told the judge that some women “ask for it.” He was dismissed, dragging his motorcycle helmet behind him.

Many jurors are never selected for a jury. They remain in the jury lounge: a clean, well-lighted place, with lots of paperbacks and magazines and run by two cheerful county employees.

Did you know that no two clocks in the courthouse show the same time?

A bailiff told us this on our first day to reduce the disorienting effect that inevitably sets in when you’re being held captive by government.

A small group of jurors-in-waiting found a television and watched the Rodney King beating trial live on Channel 11 from Los Angeles. Levels of reality or something like that.

Most of my fellow jurors were of reasonable good humor, except for a doctor who fumed the whole time. Amazingly, he was not pacified by $5 per day and mileage.

Imagine that.

Weighty Words

Stop, look, listen.

* Bumper sticker in Tierrasanta: “A Tisket, a Tasket, a Condom or a Casket.”

* With a $30-million budget deficit and potential layoffs looming, county employees are indulging in some edgy humor.

A sign in one county office reads: “We Are Having a Contest Among Our Employees. The Winner Gets to Keep His Job.”

* Heard in downtown San Diego: A homeless person speaking French.

* Kerry Wells, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted Betty Broderick, has agreed to act as a consultant to Hollywood producers planning a second made-for-TV movie about the Broderick case, this time concentrating on the two trials.

Wells’ aim will be to see that the court scenes are accurately portrayed.

* Vanity plate on a silver Jaguar spotted on Interstate 8: DCLAWED.

Rolodex Not Laughing

Book ‘em.

The Rolodex Madam Little Black Book, a novelty item dreamed up by La Jolla publicist Irene Schaffer, is meant to be a joke, with its (blank) sections for Kreeps, Renaissance Men and Volunteers, and space for emergency numbers for Whip & Chain Repair, Animal Psychologist and Oxygen Delivery.

Not everyone is amused at the $10 stocking-stuffer-like gift.

“I’ve been ripped off,” said ex-Rolodex Madam Karen Wilkening, who was not included in the project.

“Our attorneys will be picking up on this soon,” said Richard Tremmel, vice president for marketing of Rolodex Corp. of Secaucus, N.J. “Our view is that our brand name should never be used as a generic or joke.”

Schaffer is unruffled by Rolodex’s ire.

“That’s terrific,” she said. “To think that they feel threatened by a joke for our little pseudo-sophisticated community here in La Jolla!”