I received a summons to be a standby juror.  I’ve never been a juror before and I would kind of be excited about it, but it falls right in the middle of an upcoming vacation.  Now, I don’t want to get out of jury duty.  I know everybody wants to get out of jury duty, something so true it has become a cliche.  But I think everybody should do their part, I just wish my part didn’t have to fall during my vacation.  I am supposed to call a number the day before after 4:30 p.m. to find out if I am to show up at court at 9:30 a.m. the following day.  Obviously that wouldn’t leave much time and we would have to cut our vacation short just in case.  The crappy thing is that most people I’ve talked to that have bee standby jurors do not get called, so it would probably be for nothing.

So I called to see if I could just move my standby jury status to another week.  Not to get out of it, mind you, but to postpone it until it was more convenient.  I was prepared for them to tell me no.  I was not prepared for what actually happened.  I called the phone number and gave them my juror number all official like and explained the situation and the conversation went like this:

Me: “So I was wondering if I could postpone it, perhaps for a week.”
Official Jury Coordinator Guy: “You’re going on vacation?”
Me: “Yes”
Official Jury Coordinator Guy: “Just disregard the notice.”
Me: “Just disregard it?”
Official Jury Coordinator Guy: “Disregard it.”
Me: “Like, ignore it? I can do that?”
Official Jury Coordinator Guy: “Disregard it.”

Soooo, I guess I don’t have to worry about it?  He certainly didn’t seem to be concerned about it.  Perhaps he made a note on the computer (I did hear him typing at one point) and I will just be sent another notice, I don’t know.  Or I’ll go to jail.

As long as I’m talking about government stuff, let me say something about universal health care.  It has come up several times lately that France is a magical wonderland where doctor’in is free and everybody lives to 1000.  Sure, there are a lot of good things about the social programs in France and it is not hard to paint it in a good light.  The liberals here make the conservatives in France look like flithy communists.  But I’m here to tell you that all of the French guys I work with hate it with a passion.  The tax burden is so great in France that they couldn’t wait to get to the U.S.  I heard on NPR today that last year the health care in France was $9 billion dollars over budget.  That’s $9 billion on top of whatever considerable budget they had planned for it.  I did a quick seach and saw on pubmed that in 2000 their budget was $37 billion.  I’m sure that has gone up quite a bit in the last 8 years.

So I’m not saying our health care system isn’t broke and I’m not saying universal health care isn’t the way to go, but I am saying that we would have to come up with at least $50 billion a year to start with to cover it.  Factor in how much it is going to increase every year as health care naturally gets more expensive and add that to the war and Social Security and tell me how we are going to pay for that?  More taxes and a lot of them and then we end up where France ended up.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.