Jury duty: Love the view

8:05 a.m
It's quiet in the third-floor jury assembly room at the Santa Monica courthouse. The panoramic window to the west used to offer an ocean view to die for, we're told by the jury-room clerk. The Rand Corp's new multi-story office building took care of most of it, but there are still snatches of deep blue on either side.

I sit at a table with a 20-something, business-ready guy. His copy of the newly redesigned Wall Street Journal gave him away. Later we learn he's a new UCLA graduate starting an investment-banking job in July. He's got six months to do nothing but look businesslike and read the Journal. Think he gets on the jury?

A 40-ish, put-together woman, and by "put together," I mean black pantsuit and $100 haircut tries to get Internet into her 12-inch Titanium Powerbook. Somebody else has a 14-inch Titanium Powerbook, but there’s something so right about the smaller one. Again I digress. I learn later that black-pantsuit woman is a free-lance producer of some sort. Many of the potential jurors are freelancers of one kind or another. Many are from the Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades/Marina Del Ray/West Los Angeles area, but not all. How do I know? Once our names were called and we all went to court for the jury-selection process known as voir dire, the judge made all say their names, city of residence, occupation and then some. I heard a Calabasas, but nothing as far afield as Van Nuys. Guess I’m one lucky bastard.