Last week I went to jury duty for the first time ever. I think there’s some sort of pandemic of jury duty summonses going around, because nearly everyone I know here in L.A. has served within the past few months.

Anyway, so I headed downtown, to the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center at 7:45 a.m. last Wednesday. Of course, after getting off the train, and then having to go through a security check, I was a few minutes late, and I missed the jury duty guy’s initial schpiel about the process. We marched single file into a room and sat down with about 100 other people. Then one of the judges talked to us for a few minutes about the importance of jury duty, and because I’m such a civic dork, I got all pumped about it, even though I was dreading being picked up until that moment.

So after more procedural stuff, they called up the first panel, for a 25-day case. As they were calling the names, they called out a familiar name, and I later verified that it was Kevin Roderick from LA Observed! And even though I came equipped with my laptop, ready to work, they told us that the courthouse’s wifi and internet connections on their supplied computers for jurists was down, and wouldn’t return until mid-December.

And for some reason, there was a woman doing a gigantic jigsaw puzzle…really.

Then there was our 90-freaking-minute lunch, which was really rad. I had lunch on top of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in their rooftop garden and read an article in Wired about a facebook revolution in Egypt. (Girlie side note: I reeeeeally want to get married at the WDCH garden…).

Then I got back from lunch, only to sit around for another couple of hours and then go home. I didn’t even get called into a panel. I’ve heard that if you list your occupation as “journalist”, which I am, they won’t even call you up.

On my way out, I snapped this photo of Judge Frederick Wapner’s door…if you don’t know who his father Joe is, you probably didn’t watch a lot of television in the 1980s.