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Many are called

Some citizens actually want to serve on juries. So why are these people rarely picked?

The summons arrives at the door like a relative with an overnight bag - not entirely unwelcome, but inconvenient, maybe even a little annoying. It reads: "You are hereby summonsed to serve as a TRIAL JUROR."

The date and place of your required service follow, along with a clunky slogan: "Jury Service - It's for You. Your Courts, Your Community, Your Responsibility." If that doesn't motivate you, how about a $2,000 fine for failing to show up?

And so, for at least one day, you will do your civic duty as a cog in the system. You will decide whether someone deserves time apart from family and friends in a structured setting, time to think about misdeeds and perhaps learn new skills. Or, if you land on a civil trial, you'll decide whose ox had been gored and who should pay for the salve.

On your appointed day, you arrive at the appointed courthouse, armed with a book and some breath mints and a serious attitude about your courts, your community, your responsibility. You are shown to a basement room with mauve walls, and you sit on a chair whose thick cushion seems to say, "You will be here a long time, so get comfortable," or, "We appreciate your service, so we won't put you on the hard wooden chairs we give defendants."

A bailiff with a stereotypical affection for doughnuts welcomes you and your fellow prospective jurors. Then he collects the form you have filled out revealing your job, marital status, number of children, highest educational level, and other information that might be used to kick you off a jury.

Then you watch a 15-minute video with the production values of a middle school hygiene film. In it, Margaret Marshall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, welcomes you with a hint of an accent from her youth in South Africa, then says, "You are the voice of the community." You sit up straight.

Then you wait to be called, a call that may never come. The one thing extremely few alleged criminals or civil litigants seem to want is actually to be judged by a jury of their peers, especially peers who, as more than one comedian has noted, are not smart enough to get out of jury duty. The book you brought is Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, so you flip to Mark Twain, who in 1872 wrote, "The jury system puts a ban on intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury." You slump in your padded chair and close the book.

You think about great movies about jury trials, and you hope you will serve among peers like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. Then you look around the room and think about Pauly Shore in Jury Duty.

Then, inevitably, you think about O.J., and you imagine the withering gaze of Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, who bills herself as America's leading jury consultant. She earns $3,000 a day and boasts that she looked for sheep to judge the former football star. That is, sheep and African-American women, who she said would understand that just because Juice beat his former wife, it didn't mean he killed her. Then you remind yourself that the O.J. jurors were sequestered for nine months, bickered constantly, and at one point complained to Judge Ito about a fellow juror who put his stockinged feet on the table during meals.

As the time drags by and the breath mints run out, you think about the $50 a day you will earn if you get chosen for a trial that lasts three days or more. But then you think about how far behind you will be at work and how much more it would cost you if you were assigned to a long trial. So you nap.

Shortly before noon, the bailiff informs you that you are excused - all the trials scheduled for the day have been settled or scuttled or some such thing.

So you are left with the only real decision of your big day of jury duty: Do you go back to work, or do you call it a day?