A couple of months ago I received a letter from the U.S. Courts system explaining that they were updating their records and would I please fill out the form (attached). I should have let it rot in the shuffle of all the other random papers on my desk, but OCD got the best of me and I soon found myself ticking the little boxes and printing my name legibly with blue or black ink, being careful to stay on the lines. I dropped it in the mailbox one morning, and lo and behold, about a week later I received that sorry order of indentured servitude: the Jury Duty summons.

At the time, I was a freelancing in-and-out type and didn’t think jury duty would be all that much of a bother. My good friend Chelsea, a newly-minted lawyer, was working in the neighborhood and we decided we’d lunch when my session was on breaks. Of course, there was also Century 21, those hallowed halls of discount fashion. And, well, that’s about all I could come up with in terms of the pros. On the cons side, well, there’s my unshakable wariness of the U.S. legal system in general, and its cousin, the prison system. Let’s be blunt: I think they both stink.

In the meantime, things were going splendidly at my new job. A webcam was installed on my computer, thrilling me in a pre-1999 way that previously only floundering dot-coms could. Proposals were written, lunch was ordered, the coffee was grumbled about — in general, the work was a-flowin’. Yesterday, the company finalized their full-time offer and I was welcomed as a real employee of a viable, functioning company for the first time since May of 2000.

Then I remembered: Jury Duty.

So, on the second day of my second tour of Real Employment, instead of trotting to work at 9 in the morning, I’m hustling with the rest of the rats on the 6 train to Brooklyn Bridge, a commute that I haven’t done since I lived out in Crown Heights. (I watched as the 4 train went by on the express track, thanking the good lord that I now have the choice of walking to work every day, where the worst thing that can happen is an encounter with the street sweeper before I’ve had my coffee, instead of having my head jammed in someone’s armpit while attempting to keep from vomiting due to claustrophobia on the subway.)

What can I say about jury duty that hasn’t been said before? It totally blows. By lunchtime, I’d nearly finished “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and hadn’t been selected for anything. I was beginning to wonder if they’d overlooked my presence. I opted to flee early, and found Chelsea for lunch.

But wait.

The story is better with one physical detail that I have omitted until now.

See, last night I had a little accident. Like Roy, I was mauled by a cat. My cat, Kovick. All night, she’d been trying to catch some poor fly that somehow got into our apartment. Perched on my computer monitor, she was about to jump from there to the loft bed a few feet away, where apparently the fly was hovering. Unaware of any of the synapses that were firing in her little brain, I strolled over to my computer to check my email and instead received a cat in the face.

As a result, I have three tremendous red scratches running down the left side of my face. I look like I got in a knife fight. People stare at me on the street. I overhead a woman exclaim in terror to her friend, “Look at her face!”

So I’m dressed like a maniac, with gashes on my face, clutching a 400 page book in the jury room. About an hour after lunch I decided I’d had enough. I approached the clerk’s desk with trepidations, Chelsea having told me that they don’t take excuses very well. I calmly explained to the Sassy Lady Clerk there that this was my first time serving, and that I’d just started a new job yesterday, and blahbity blah blah. She raised an eyebrow.

Sassy Lady Clerk, eyes rolling: “Honey, why have you been sitting here all day?”

Me, shrinking inwardly at my pathetic submission to authority: “Um. I don’t know. I was afraid that wasn’t a legitimate excuse.”

“Legitimate excuse? That’s a pressing obligation.” She glanced at the other clerk at the desk, an overweight man in a yarmulke who was sweating profusely, and he began riffling through the juror cards to remove mine. “But you’ve already wasted all of today.”

“One day is better than three,” I said.

“You got that right.”

Sassy Lady Clerk filled out a form that I could show to my boss (”So she doesn’t think you were playing hooky all day.”) and I was on my way, scarface and all.