Civil Duties

Tomorrow I take on one of the responsibilities of being an American citizen...jury duty.

Is it awful that I'm praying to not get picked? I'm actually very annoyed that I have to spend my entire day off at the court house. I spent quite a few of my youngin' days at the court house and ever since I have not been fond of them. No, I was not a juvenile delinquent. My Mom was a court reporter and occasionally I would go to work with her. For those of you not familiar with court personnel, a court reporter (technically stenographer) is the person listening to court proceedings and writing it verbatim in short hand.

As a young whippersnapper, I thought Mom's job was easy. She can type wicked fast and all she had to do was listen to people. When she retired last year I really thought about her job. She had to sit for hours, listening to multiple people and recording every single word or sound. Every thing that happened in the court room was her responsibility. No daydreaming, no taking a break whenever you felt like it. Also she had to be able to read back on the spot, in short hand no less! I had to take a transcription class and I was able to get most of the translation right, with furious rewinding/forwarding. I can't imagine doing it in real time.

Not to mention the content she had to record. Some trials were your run of the mill stuff. Then there were murder trials. These trials were especially long and tedious. No doubt Mom could tell horrific tales if she wanted to. 

I always found the court house to be a slightly interesting, creepy place. Mom's office had a window, with a great view of the jail across the street. Eating my lunch and being able to see the jailbirds sitting in the windows with their orange jumpsuits was always a strange experience. There was always someone new to meet. Sheriff's officers, clerks, court reporters, secretaries, and judges. The secretaries were always really nice and let me use their loud typewriters. Judges had to be respected and were a pretty big deal. Some were friendly, some not. The sheriff's officers always identified me by my mother. However, no matter who they were there would always be the inevitable, "I haven't seen you since you were a baby!!"

One of the downsides of her profession was that I could not get in touch with her always. While most kids have one phone number to remember, I had an index card. This card was a long list of contacts who I could call to track Mom down and pass on a message. She had break times and a voicemail but most of life's needs don't always fall in those times. If I had to track her down I at least wanted the message to be important.

As I catch up on my reading tomorrow and wait for the end of the day, I'm sure I'll be thinking of all these memories. I have to hand it to Mom, she made a difficult job look easy.