Strictly you do print them out because a print out comes out of the printer… it goes back to the days when print paper has little holes down the side and came on a roll
I got a summons for jury duty yesterday. Unless I get excused(medical shit), I am to report for jury selection at 8:45 the morning of May 11th. I don’t mind getting called for jury duty. I’d just like to get selected once in a while. As is the historic pattern, and I made this same complaint the last time I got a summons, I’m at the tail end of the alphabet so they go through just about everyone else and have their jury before they get to me. It translates to me spending eight hours sitting on a hard wood bench killing my back, which will take about a week to recover, and sent home with instructions to call the next morning to see if they still need me, and the thanks of the court for even showing up at all.
That happened to me once and it turned out to be the Grand Jury, not just a court case. I had to serve for 6 months if I remember right, one day a week. I think it was Wednesdays. All we did was listen to potential cases and decide if it was worth taxpayer's money to send it on to trial or not.
One of my coworkers at 9-1-1 ended up on a grand jury that had a homicide case where he had been the call-taker. Apparently that's not a conflict of interest or whatever.
They go alphabetically? That seems very strange. I've only been summoned once (in Canada). Seemed like everything was randomized. I almost jumped out of my seat when I was the first person they called to be questioned/interviewed by the prosecutor and defense lawyer. And I was also the first person they selected for the pool, and again for the jury. Lucky me. Fortunately, the accused decided to change their plea after a few days as I really could not have taken the financial hit at the time. I was pretty young and didn't know that you can explain to the judge that not getting paid for 10 days and then getting paid $40 a day after that would render you destitute.
I won a $10 e-card to Boston Market. Only problem is the one near me is gone and there is only one in my state and it's far away, and there are none in the other two states I drive through fairly regularly. I didn't especially care for their food as I recall, but a free lunch would have been a free lunch.
My mother passed away in January. She had a small estate and I'm trying to get it settled. All I need to do is pay any remaining bills (if they show up after I've distributed her estate, I will be on the hook for them). It is the hardest thing to do to get institutions to tell me how much owes; but they will not accept money from me until I prove she is dead. I get that there is paperwork, but seems to me they should just take the money and run, without worrying about the source. But I have to get each one a copy of the death certificate. And of course the call centers are in India or elsewhere, with varying degrees of linguistic challenges and lack of real information. And varied hold times.
We've seen a pushback about the foreign call centers in the restaurant industry. More and more companies are finally paying attention to customer service and moving back to US based services. Not the billion dollar ones like GrubHub and Ubereats, but most of the medium ones. It became a business contention where we refused to deal with the overseas bullshit.
Shutterstock no longer let you download watermarked versions of their images so you can play with them and see if they're really what you want for your cover design. No, now you have to commit and pay from what you see on their website. I suppose a lot of people were cheating and PhotoShopping the watermarks out. But it's a PITA. I guess I'll do my dry runs from cropped screen shots.
Jury duty has been called off. I have been getting suggestions all week on how to get out of it, and then grief for not wanting to get out of it. For all the pissing and moaning people do about how broken our judicial system is, not many seem to be willing to actually do much of anything about it.
Yeah, the system as it is does not work very well. At the very least they can do away with the monetary concerns. The bureaucratic savings alone should make it worth doing, I mean, why have all these people who are never going to serve on juries be forced through the process? I say compensate jurors for their time at the same rate that they are compensated for their current job. There'd have to be a cap of course for the rich people. Simple solution, why aren't we doing this already?
If one person is paid $15 an hour to cover her job at the coffeee kiosk and the guy sitting next to her is pulling in $150 an hour to cover his job as a new construction plumber, and they're doing the same duty, I suspect protests might arise. Yep. I have been called for federal, district, and municipal court duty so many times in fifty years that I've lost count: at least three times with federal court, maybe half a dozen times in district court, and several in municiple court. My husband has never been called. Never. It is a royal pain in the butt to get called for district and federal court in the same damn year, but I've done it. No one has ever or will ever allow me to sit on a jury due to professional and familial associations with law enforcement and law firms, but I only ever asked to be released when my children were small and I was the main care provider. Appearing for jury pools, voir dire, and serving on juries is a civic duty, and a terrible time to take the attitude, "Someone else can do it; I'm too busy/important/uninterested/lazy/the system doesn't work anyway/whatever." Retired Federal Court Judge Bill Downes is a former Marine who did a couple of tours in Vietnam. To say he didn't put up with nonsense in his courtroom is an understatement. He wasn't unreasonable: he went out of his way to grant leaves for people requesting two weeks for a long planned vacation or a last minute trip to care for a sick parent. During one trial, I was already sitting in the jury box waiting for voir dire to begin when a man who was called for voir dire protested loudly about the inconvenience of on jury duty. Judge Downes pointed out that at that exact moment, men and women in the US armed services were dying in Afghanistan, and he, Judge Downes, was not the least bit sympathetic about a week's inconvenience for the protesting man who should Sit. Down. Now. I don't recall if he was chosen as a juror or not.
As long as I'm on a small rant, my other annoys-me item is folks who go on and on about how SOMEONE should take care of various social problems but steadfastly refuse to spend an hour a week doing so much as volunteering at the local charity thrift shop sorting through donations because they work, they have families, and they are just sooooo busy with their bridge club. Can't lend a hand because you're using both of yours to drive your children to soccer practice? Fine, just shut up about what you think other people should be doing to save the world. End of rant. Probably. Maybe.
Dog: -not one peep or show of interest- Me: -makes food- Dog: -totally fine- Me: -sits down to eat food- Dog: OMFG I GOTTA PEE SO BAD!!!! GET UP OFF YOUR ASS AND TAKE ME OUTSIDE YOU HORRIBLY LAZY HUMAN!!!! -proceeds to whine and howl and jump at the door and my leg and bump my elbow while i eat-
Okay, so who is it that decides what counts as horror fiction? I checked out a horror anthology from the library, and there is nothing horrific about it. This isn’t even RL Stein Goosebumps level horror.
The singular 'they' in any context. Cliché is a noun, never an adjective. Almost everybody who uses the phrase 'begs the question' has no idea what it means.
"Somebody stole my bike last night!" "I thought you had a good lock?" "Yeah, they cut the whole bike rack in half."
An unknown number of bike thieves. Properly, I guess, it should be 'he, she, or they cut the whole bike rack in half' (although as a nod to the current insanity times, we should probably list all 89 possible genders). I'll also carve out an exception for dialogue vs. description, so 'in almost every context'.
"That person cut the whole bike rack in half." Unless, of course, it was a bike-riding orca who bit the thing in half.
Probably was a plural "they." If it's anything like here, all those theft rings use 3-5 person teams. The actual thieves are usually minors who can't be tried as adults, with the more senior members posted as lookouts in innocuous public places.
