Trial of Jury Duty

I went down to the courthouse for Jury Duty yesterday. This is the third time I have had to appear for Jury Duty in my life. The first two times, I sat around for a few hours and then the judge came in and sent us all home because the trials for the day had all been settled. I never even made it into the courtroom. This time...well, the same thing happened again. Is it me? Does anyone ever actually get to go into the courtroom and be peremptorily challenged?

I did get to hear four times how valuable my jury service was--it turns out that merely by being in the courthouse, willing to serve, I was performing an invaluable public service because, well...they never do actually say what invaluable public service I performed. Unless of course the lawyers in the cases all said, "You know Jim Hartley in in the jury pool--I guess we better settle this one quick."

I can report that the new courthouse in Belchertown is much better than the one I previously had to go to in Northampton. For one thing, there is free parking--I found it highly annoying on my previous two trips to the jury pool that I had to pay for parking to perform my invaluable service as a juror, when said "invaluable" service is apparently not valuable enough to the Commonwealth for it to pay the cost of parking my car for the day.