Jury Duty...

I’m tentatively scheduled to have jury duty tomorrow. I received a summons several weeks ago which says this afternoon I’m supposed to call an Allegheny County Courthouse number after 4:00 PM whereupon an answering machine will tell me whether to report or not.
I have a little trepidation which I haven’t had before. What if the bathroom breaks aren’t frequent enough for my over sixty bladder? What if the lawyers are boring and I nod off during a trial?
My sister told me she was called for jury duty twice in her life, once here and once in Philadelphia. Neither time did she actually sit on a jury..just in a waiting room they were drawing prospective jurors from. Maybe that will happen for me.
I served on a Federal Grand Jury for about 18 months in Key West back in the late 70’s while I was still teaching kindergarten. We met four or five times during that period.
We only had two serious cases come before that Grand Jury. One was the notorious Audubon House burglary case where the one of only four existing sets of the Audubon Elephant Portfolios was stolen and the culprits needed to be indicted. The other was a gun running case.Most of our time was taken up handling the most common cases in Federal System then, the theft of senior citizens’ social security checks, usually from ones mailbox. Almost all of these cases were the same. An Assistant US Attorney would appear with several Miami based FBI agents. (none of these cases ever came from the Florida Keys or Key West during this period).
A person would report that they hadn’t received their Social Security Check and would discover after complaining that it had been cashed. The FBI would retrieve the check from the SS Administration and inspect it for fingerprints. They would discover the fingerprints of the daughter, niece, son-in-law, next door neighbor etc. on the check and bring the evidence to us for the indictment. This happened dozens of times during my jury tenure. It doesn’t occur as much today because the SS Administration has gotten most people to have their checks directly deposited.
I hope that if I do actually wind up on a jury it will be an interesting case.