It's coming. You know it is. You don’t want to see it, those capitalized letters: JURY SUMMONS. It comes when you least expect it, when you aren’t even thinking about it. It comes when you’re busy or can’t possibly make it at the summons day. It’s your civic duty so you postpone it, knowing that you still have a month or two of school left. Picking a date way out in advance so you can finish all your summer classes and not have to worry about it for a long time. Then it comes again. JURY SUMMONS. There’s no avoiding it now; you’ve already postponed it. Anxiously waiting, hoping, praying that they decide they don’t need you to come in, you look at the website to see which jurors are needed to appear. You see a group number and then look at your summons with shaking hands. The numbers match. Sighing out of frustration you phone the number they provided to make sure that they didn’t put the wrong number on the website. It’s the same number. They still need you to appear. You have to go back to school in just a few weeks and so you start to worry if they’ll make you stay on a long trial. Having this much bad luck you already know that they’ll pick you and that it will be a long trial; one of those long homicide trials where the husband is accused of murdering the wife that you’ve seen on Dateline time and time and again. You check the summons to make sure that there isn’t any option for you to mark to be excused. Nope, no option. The only option you see is the ‘financial hardship’ option which doesn’t apply to you since you don’t have to support a spouse and three children while also paying off a mortgage and your spouse’s life insurance. What they failed to understand is that it costs money to get to the courthouse, money that you don’t have, money you’re being forced to spend sitting for eight or more hours only making $15 a day when you’re over $50,000 in debt. But of course that isn’t an exemption option. So you show up, early, and stand in line with all the other prospective jurors, tapping your foot, glancing at your summons to make sure you filled it all out correctly and that there really isn’t any option for you to get out. The doors open up and as you round the corner you see a tall poster-board with instructions that you already knew (they were printed directly on the summons), but then the line comes to a halt as numerous people ahead of you hadn’t followed the instructions on the summons or read the poster-board. They have to fill it out before they can give it to the lady with the forced smile who stands by the door. She waves her hand and directs you and the rest of the line to continue around the confused potential jurors. Ripping the summons for you she directs you to grab a work-slip and then you take a seat. Pulling out a book you read quietly as everyone else piles into the large room. Once everyone is more-or-less inside a voice comes out of the speakers in the ceiling. It’s jarring at first, but once everyone becomes silent it’s easier to listen to him. He says a few words and then puts on an ‘instructional’ video. The video lasts for about fifteen minutes, of which you and about two-thirds of the other potential jurors zoned out during. The voice comes back through the speaker and they inform everyone that it is such a big case that they will be bringing the judge down to the juror’s room instead of everyone going to the courtroom. They start calling out names but once a few people don’t respond they inform you that everyone is selected, all three hundred people are needed. Everyone grunts and sighs and you think to yourself “I knew it…”