What does a plate of fried rice have to do with jury duty? Well, that was my new place for the week. I went to SaNae Thai in Everett during my lunch break while waiting to find out if I would be selected to be on a jury.

Let’s do a little jury duty math, shall we?

Daily jury duty pay in Snohomish County: $10.

Cost of a plate of pineapple fried rice, a cup of tea, and a tip: Approximately $17.

My hourly rate as a freelancer: $20-25.

Jury duty sucks if you are a freelancer, self-employed, or work for a small business that doesn’t provide paid days off for your jury service. And here in Snohomish County, you’re on the hook for a week. Every day during your week of jury service, you have to call in the evening to find out if you have to go in the next day. So good luck dealing with that and your day job or freelance projects.

Very few people actually like jury duty. And for a lot of people, it’s an active hardship.

So I started brainstorming some ideas to make jury duty better. Some of them aren’t very practical, but there you have it.

-First of all, $10/day is insulting. I’d almost rather not be offered any pay at all. I don’t think I would have even been excited about $10 for approx 8 hours of work back when I was 12 years old. As an adult with real bills giving up the potential of paid freelance gigs to be at the courthouse, I’m definitely not excited. I mean, even if you have a day job that gives you paid jury duty leave, what is that $10 going to do for you? Buy you lunch at Subway? Pay should be increased.

-We were given an out-of-date page of info on nearby places to eat, complete with a map, which was a nice thought. How about taking it a step further and seeing if any of the restaurants would be willing to offer a small jury duty discount? Show your badge and get 15% off, or free coffee with the purchase of a doughnut, or something.

-What if you could do jury duty instead of going to traffic school to avoid getting points on your license?

But what I’d really like to see is a complete overhaul of our jury duty system. It’s ridiculous that you just get randomly called up at any point in the year and you have to derail your life for it.

I’d like to propose a jury duty application process.

-Jury duty application would begin at the end of the previous year. Choose 2 weeks during the year that you are available for jury service. This would be on a first come, first serve basis, to ensure that every week of the year had coverage. Only X amount of people would be able to request each week.

-You would have the option of indicating what sort of cases you would not be able to serve on the trial for due to bias or hardship. During my jury selection process, there was a person in the jury pool who had a traumatic experience related to the subject nature of the case, and was crying and unable to speak. There was no reason why that person should have had to be in that room.

-Ideally, freelancers, the self-employed and anyone else who doesn’t get paid if they don’t work would be able to either be completely exempt from jury duty, or be guaranteed to be put on cases that would only last for a day.

-I suppose it’s important for the prosecutor and defense to be able to read your body language when questioning you for jury selection, but it sure would be a lot more convenient if you could fill out an online questionnaire based on the details of the case and that would determine whether you had to actually physically come to the courthouse and serve on the case. No one should have to spend half a day sitting on uncomfortable chairs killing time until everyone is ready for the jury selection process to begin.

Our current process is just so clunky and annoying for everyone involved. I understand the importance of having your case judged by a jury of your peers. But I hate to think that if I was being judged, that it would be by 12 people who were all thinking about how much they’d rather be anyplace else in the world, how much work they’re going to have to catch up on when they’re done with this and how they’re going to have to rearrange their budget to make up for missed pay.

Have you ever served on a jury duty? What do you think would make the process less frustrating?