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June 6, 2003 - Friday

 Djam Karet

I did jury duty yesterday. I was tempted to go all Forrest Gump on you and end it right there: “I did jury duty today. And that’s all I got to say about that.” But apparently I got more to say because I’m still typing…

I guess I’m just not a People Person, because I seem to get into minor altercations everywhere I go. Today’s beef was with some pinhead who stole my seat.

Early in the day I staked out a prime spot where a chair was tucked into a little alcove in the back of the room away from everything else. It had a wall on the left and cubicle walls on the right and rear — it was basically a little cave where I could stretch out with my feet up on a chair in front of me and isolate myself. I camped out in there with my book and my headphones and was in full anti-social splendor all morning.

After the lunch break, though, I came back to find Nipplehead squatting in my spot. It was a deliberate violation of my morning territorial markings — I knew he knew it was my spot because I’d seen him cruise it a few times in the morning session. I knew then that he was scoping it out for possible squatting after lunch, and that’s exactly what he’d done. I came back early just to prevent this, but he’d beaten me to it. The fucker.

I gave him some stink-eye and sort of threw my bag down in disgust and generally made it pretty clear that I wasn’t happy with his squatting, and then I parked myself right next to the mouth of “his” cave and said to anyone who might be listening that “You’d better not move, then, because I’m taking it back if you do.” He pretended to ignore me and we proceeded to share an uneasy detente for the next hour or so, me reading a book and listening to Mark Cohn on my MP3 player, him listening to his Music For Seat-Stealing Nippleheads CD on his headphones.

And then he had to go to the bathroom.

He made a big fuss about staking out the spot before he left. He arranged the seat just so, positioned his backpack perfectly in the middle, balanced his newspaper on top of that… He made it clear to me and everyone else around that he was Coming Back and this was His Seat. Basically, he flagged it as Saved, and any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters know that a Saved seat is inviolable — you don’t sit there. You just don’t. You can’t. So I didn’t. Instead, I moved his stuff.

I put it all on a chair just outside the alcove, positioning it it there just the way he’d done it himself. His seat was now open. But technically it was still Saved, at least for me. because I’d been there for the Saving process. But not the woman who came by a few minutes later and noticed the empty seat.

“Is someone sitting there?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I replied innocently. “I think he left.”

And so she sat down.

When Nipplehead got back, he clearly didn’t know what to do. He hemmed and hawed for a couple seconds, and made a big show of being pissed off about losing his seat, but the woman didn’t move — and probably never even considered it — because she didn’t know what his problem was. He eventually gave me some major stink-eye and then grabbed his stuff and moved to a different seat on the other side of the room. Ha!

Me, I was satisfied. I’d lost my seat, but now he couldn’t have it either. I could live with that kind of balance.

I never did get picked for a jury. Probably just as well — you wouldn’t want someone this juvenile on your jury, would you?


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