Jury Duty - Being Fired - Dubbing Films

[Rita Winston]

I have been summoned to jury duty many times, once back when I lived in
New York City and many times since I returned to my native Los Angeles.
I have been on the panel for voir dire many times, but NEVER accepted to
actually be on a jury. (Voir dire, French for "to see, to say") is when
the jurors are asked questions in order for the lawyers to decide
whether to allow them to be on the jury for this case.

Santa Monica is the best courthouse to be a juror that I've been in.
Some of the chairs in the jury waiting room are comfortable, those can
be moved to be away from the noise of the TV, the jury clerk staff are
all really nice and let you wander the courthouse as long as you tell
them when you'll be back and you don't go into any trials, and when you
have to wait outside a court room, there are usually enough benches in
the hall for almost everyone to sit down. The first time I served in
Santa Monica, the building was infested with TV news crews because of
preliminary motions in the OJ civil trial.

I've served in Downtown Los Angeles, where they send panels walking
almost three blocks between the Criminal Courthouse and the County
Courthouse. I prefer the County Courthouse, whose jury waiting room has
a glass door out onto an attractive plaza. Both have not enough seats
for everyone in jury waiting rooms, and when you have to wait in the
hall outside a courtroom, there is only one or two benches so almost all
the jurors have to sit on the floor or stand. The last time I served in
the Criminal Courthouse, the ninth floor and the parking lot across the
street were infested with TV news crews because of preliminary motions
in the OJ criminal case. That very news coverage was being watched on
the TV in the jury waiting room, which would have disqualified all of us
from being chosen as jurors in that case.

New York City was the worst: jurors waiting to be put on a panel wait in
a huge ancient room with comfortable hard pews for seating and an armed
police woman at the door, whose permission one had to ask to go to the
bathroom. 

I was on one panel in NYC where a fellow panelist was asked the usual
question "What do you do for a living?" and she replied: "Umm, last time
I answered that, the entire panel was disqualified."  So both lawyers
and the jury clerk and the (as I recall, in NYC, it is some other job,
not a judge, who supervises the voir dire) all went out in the hall to
find out what she does for a living, while the rest of us speculated on
what kind of job could be so bad that mere knowledge of its existence
would possibly prejudice a juror against one side or the other in the
lawsuit.

-----------------------------------------------Pepperwood, thunderbird
down, seven inches
-----------------------------------------------

I was fired by a COBOBL-pgmmer-temp-agency in IIRC 1981 (age 23). I
believe the real reason was that they didn't have an assignment to send
me to, but the guy who fired me made me wait in an office for hours
before he came in to explain that it was because of my slothful and
unbusinesslike ways. (He also gave me the phone # for a good headhunter,
who found me a new job in a couple of weeks.) I felt totally devastated
and tears ran down my face -- or am I confusing it with earlier that
same year when my boyfriend broke up with me?

-----------------------------------------------
character I'm most like: Mrs. Figg
-----------------------------------------------

I was really impressed to hear that in Israel and Mexico, only
children's films are dubbed. Cinema chains in USA seem to believe that
subtitled films are useless because Americans can't read, and of course
Americans can't speak any other language -- even some dialects of
British are subtitled or dubbed. I can't speak any other language, but I
CAN read.

-----------------------------------------------Ravenclaw, of course
-----------------------------------------------

Mike Goat was unspeakably witty on trial/trail/machine guns. 

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