Just about every year, I get summoned for jury duty. The way they do it here is they make you report to the “Hall of Justice” along with the other Super Friends…OK, I made up the part about the Super Friends. But it really is called the “Hall of Justice”.
Anyway, the way it works is that you have to report to the Hall of Justice and then sit around for a half a day to find out if you’re going to be needed for a trial. If you’re not selected for a jury, you get to go home and you’re off the hook for another year. I found out when I got there that in July, they had switched back to being a mask-mandatory facility.
That means everyone is expected wear a mask at all times. Unless you’re eating or drinking something. Then it’s OK to take your mask off. I wish I knew before I left home that I could bring a tasty snack and go maskless until I was done eating. Who knew that Doritos could be used as a prophylactic to protect yourself against COVID? I know I didn’t.
So, I had to go somewhere I didn’t really want to be, to do something I didn’t really want to do. And then, I had to sit there for hours wearing a fucking mask.
Not only that, they also enforced “social distancing”. But not really.
The chairs are arranged in normal chair fashion with no leg room and each chair touching the ones next to it. But, to thwart the virus, they left every other chair empty. So, the social distancing was, at most, three feet nose-to-nose.
We were cheerfully told that if we didn’t want to wear a mask, we were welcome to take our masks off while outside the building…where it was nearly 100 degrees. So, I had the choice of dying of heat stroke outside, or dying of embarrassment inside while looking like an idiot for wearing a mask.
I’m listening to them explain the COVID policy and thinking to myself, “what kind of a moron would come up with something like this?”
I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Because next they moved on to cover the travel reimbursement policy.
And that policy goes like this: For the first day, we get nothing. I’m not sure what the reasoning is, it costs the same to get there and back on Day One as it does on Days Two through Whatever. But, for reasons only a politician could understand, on the first day we get squat.
For Days Two through Whatever, jurors get $15 per day, plus mileage. I guess $15 per day sounded like a lot back when trial-by-jury was invented. But, these days, people are used to making slightly more than that.
The IRS allowable mileage deduction is currently 62.5 cents per mile. So, I bet you’re thinking that jurors are reimbursed at least something close to that.
Well, you’d be wrong.
Ventura County will reimburse jurors 34 cents per mile. But only in one direction. That’s right. They reimburse jurors 34 cents per mile for driving either to or from the Hall of Justice. But not both. And only after the first day.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I usually travel from someplace, to another place and then…and here’s the important part…and then I go back to where I started. In fact, I can’t think of a time when I’ve driven anywhere locally and didn’t go home later that same day.
But maybe there’s a method to their madness. Jurors still have that $15 burning a hole in their pocket. So, they can take $10 of that $15 and spend it on a nearby high-quality hotel room. That will save them the cost of gas to drive home and leave them with $5 for entertainment. Which, and I’m totally guessing here, is just about enough for a Lewinsky.
It all makes perfect sense now. Their travel reimbursement policy is part of their COVID policy. Individually, neither their COVID policy nor their travel reimbursement policy make sense. But put them together and then you’ve got something.
Because once your daytime hooker has finished bobbing for apples, you’ll have much worse things to worry about than catching COVID.
We now know what kind of a moron would come up with such an idiotic COVID policy. The same kind of a moron that came up with the insane travel reimbursement policy.
Being the curious type of a person that I am, I had to know more.
It turns out that the moron is also known as the “Court Executive Officer”. The Court Executive Officer is appointed by the judges. These are the same judges who are supposed to be thoughtful and wise. But at least one of them signed off on forcing nonsense COVID rules and paying people a quarter of what even the IRS believes it costs to operate our vehicles.
I don’t know about you, but from where I sit, that throws “thoughtful and wise” right out the window.
Armed with that bit of knowledge, I have no choice but to question the judges’ decision-making on…well…everything. How can I not? Because if they’re capable of approving such idiotic and nonsensical policies, then what other boneheaded decisions are they capable of making?
How could someone whose job it is to make decisions be so bad at it?
Then it hit me. Judges in Ventura County (and probably in your location too) are elected. And you all know what I think about elected officials. That’s right. As elected officials, the main focus of the judges isn’t to make sure that justice is meted out fairly, it’s to make sure that they get reelected.
So, their decisions aren’t necessarily about doing what’s fair and just, or even rational. Their decisions are about making sure enough people are happy with those decisions, so they can get enough votes to keep their job. And, apparently, they feel that voters will be impressed with mask mandates and coming in under budget on travel expenses.
And that’s why we now find ourselves in a situation where judges appear to believe that COVID can be prevented by a bag of munchies, and that it costs nothing to travel from point B back to point A.
Which is why I had to sit there for hours wearing a mask while looking and feeling like an idiot. All because some judge did the math and decided that forcing people to wear masks would somehow mean more votes for him at election time.
Well, that, and because I didn’t think to bring a snack.
Related Links
Ventura County Courts COVID policy July 2022
