Jury duty

I had my first experience being on a jury this past week. It was quite eye opening. The case was misdemeanor charges of assault and related counts.
The first interesting aspect of the experience was voir dire. It's astonishing how many potential jurors knew family or friends with DUIs, at least 1/2 the panel. Many of the folks seem to have poor abilities separating legal concepts vs every day speech.
The actual trial was both extremely tedious and enlightening. There is A LOT of waiting around. So inefficient! Questioning witnesses is an ordeal when a witness has low language levels but you can pick up a lot from body language and demeanor.
The jury discussion was actually very fulfilling. First I was surprised by how different people's initial opinions were (silly me, they don't all think like me...) but I also found the ideas and questions from the other jurors to be very useful.
It was a diverse group of people, by gender and race. Some of them were a landscape architect, a mobile phone employee, an advertising person who did portrait sketches during testimony, a person who ran two car related YouTube sites, and a person who is interested in geographic mapping.
Overall it was rather exhausting but a worthy experience. However I could do without another one for awhile.