Conservative Blogger, <em>WaPo</em> Designer Dragged Into Jury Duty For Nothing

Few people like being called in for jury duty. It's a time suck and you get little, if anything, in return for the service. As fate would have it, both conservative blogger Lisa De Pasquale and Tim Wong, designer at WaPo, were called in yesterday. Both were dismissed without actually having to do anything. De Pasquale's potential case, she told FishbowlDC, involved a man dying while being transported from a nursing home. The plaintiff, a woman, believed the company transporting the man was to blame for his death. The defedants were two Hispanic men accompanied by a translator. "The only time I'm up this early is when I'm going to the airport," she tweeted yesterday at a not-that-early 7 a.m. "But this time I'm not going anywhere fun. Just to jury duty." Nearly eight hours later, a lawyer eliminated her. She doesn't know why, but has a hunch. "I suspect saying I was involved in media relations was probably what got me booted," she said. So, a waste of a day. Except we did learn that De Pasquale may be an obsessive compulsive... "Remind me to bathe in anti-bacterial lotion when I get home," she tweeted. She explained her germaphobia to us: "I'm a hermit," she said. "I work in a small office. I drive to work. I shop on Sunday mornings when the rest of the world is asleep. I try to interact with people as little as possible. My reward is that I've never had the flu. I didn't want to get sick after being around so many people with so many germs." Wong told us he wasn't sure what he was called in for, simply explaining it was "some criminal case." He tweeted on Monday that he was "getting increasingly anxious about the prospect of getting called for jury duty." He said the anxiety was brought on by worrying that he wouldn't have enough time to get actual work done ahead of Inauguration. Like De Pasquale, he was cut from the jury pool, though he was clueless on that as well. Also like De Pasquale, Wong may suffer from OCD. The court he was summoned to is in Marlboro, Va. Here's how he made sure he had enough time to get there: "It takes about 45 minutes to get there from my house and it takes me about 45 minutes to comfortably get ready in the morning. I didn't want to chance being late so I set four alarms at 15 minute intervals beginning at 5 a.m. I also had trouble sleeping last night — I kept waking up every half hour or so worrying that I had overslept. I normally wake up around 8, so actually having to be someplace relatively far away even earlier than that had me a little on edge." We're glad De Pasquale's and Wong's jury duty nightmare is over. But we hope they get the beta-blockers it appears they need.

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Conservative Blogger, WaPo Designer Dragged Into Jury Duty For Nothing

Eddie Scarry

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Eddie Scarry