In praise of inefficiency...

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed jury duty last week. I’d never been called before (one of the perks of being a near-transient for a huge chunk of your life), but I did know that a) I wasn’t going anywhere and b) I should bring a book. (Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers—nice character study of Pakistani Muslims in London, if a little purple and precious in the telling.) That’s more than many of my fellow prospects figured out, which led to a lot of grumbling as we were repeatedly marched to a new room and then abandoned for an hour or so. I mean, where did they think we were going?

Around 2 that first afternoon, my section of the pool made it to the voir dir. I was asked to describe my job (good thing I wasn’t up for selection on the Beanie trial), where I went to college, and what my parents did for a living. (Near as I can tell they were trying to get a socioeconomic/ class reading on me.) After they axed some obvious sore thumbs—the cop’s son who said he’d give greater weight to police testimony, the guy who claimed his cousin had been “wrongly imprisoned”—I was among those selected, as juror 13. That made me first alternate: I’d sit in on the trial, but unless someone had to bail out for some emergency reason, I wouldn’t participate in final deliberations.

Still, the trial itself promised to be juicy and entertaining. The defendant was accused of beating the shit out of his sister and leaving the house. When he came back, she was dead, so he rolled her into a carpet, wrapped it in masking tape, and dumped her in a crack house. Ten years later, her skeleton turns up, and a DNA test identified her.

Day two we were assembled at 9:30, which gave us plenty of time to sit around, since we weren’t taken to the jury room till noon or so. We sat around here for another hour, waiting for the bailiff to lead us out into the courtroom. He never came back. Instead, the judge himself popped in—to tell us we could all go home. Turns out the dude confessed at the last minute, after the judge allowed a particular damning piece of evidence. His Honor thanked us for our service, spoke glowingly about Magna Carta, and dismissed us. If there was any doubt that the process had been a waste of time, here was our final confirmation.

Except: there was something stimulating about being part of this wasteful, sluggish bureaucratic process. Maybe it’s because I work from home, so it was a more social environment than I’m used to—though to be fair, my fellow jurors aren’t folks I’d be likely to meet in my everyday travels anyway. But mostly, I was caught up in the careless rhythm of the courthouse. If something doesn’t get done today, there’s always tomorrow. There’s never a sense of urgency. It was relaxing, like watching baseball. It felt, you know, judicious, like a system that might eventually get stuff right in the long run.

I guess this isn’t quite the historical moment to celebrate inefficiency as a governing concept—though I’d distinguish between “inefficient” and “incompetent.” But the cult of efficiency has always chafed me, since it’s standard corpo-speak for “more work, less pay.” And my own work pace is crazily inefficient—James Thurber said he needed to factor “loafing time” into his workday, and I think anyone who does anything vaguely “creative” comes to the same conclusion eventually.

On top of that, I’m kinda fascinated by with the delays people are willing to put up with—daily commutes, for instance, or football games. How do we distinguish between an unacceptable “wait” and a standard, unavoidable part of our day? Or maybe I'm just trying to justify the fact that I'm posting a day late...