response to a letter to the editor

[jwg]

Several weeks ago there was an article in the Globe about jury duty; it asked for people to write in about their experiences. I wrote a letter that said that my jury duty experiences were fine but my last call to duty was pretty poor with two notices in 2 days, 2 weeks notice, a web site for rescheduling that was under construction and an always busy phone number. It was published on Nov 12.

Most amazing was that I received a letter from a Jury commissioner yesterday saying that she had read my letter and apologized for the inconvenience. She explained that this was an exceptional situation. They had expected to seat a jury for a potentially long civil trial on my call day and they sent last minute notices to a large amount of people to make sure they had enough potential jurors. As a result they got an abnormally large amount of telephone calls that overwhelmed their system. The described broken website was due to the fact that they had a year's supply of the notice cards printed and the web site wasn't ready for the beginning of the year. I can see from the address that they looked up my address since it wasn't printed in the paper.

Quite surprising that someone took the trouble to do this and give a real explanation instead of a form letter.