How Jury Duty Sparked My Writing Career
On November 26, I was summoned for jury duty. This relatively normal event was completely out of the blue for me. I’d managed to avoid doing this civic duty until age 35. For some reason, it really threw me off course. I was in a job that was making me increasingly unhappy, with levels of poor management above me and no hope of career growth. A stagnant dead end, surrounded by frustrating people.
Jury duty meant forced, unpaid time off of work from a job that would allow me no vacation days. I was anxious about losing pay for an unforeseen amount of time, and even more anxious about how my boss would react to this situation. I was having full blown panic attacks. I could barely sleep.
By the time jury duty day came around in February, I was exhausted. The stress was wearing on me — Living with a job that was 40 hours per week of navigating managers who think it should be 1982 forever, a shipper who refuses to use a computer at all, customers who managed to call me both “Sweetie” and “Useless” in the same sentence simply because I was new to the industry… It was killing me.
Jury duty was starting to look like a week on the beach.
The day before you report to the courthouse to serve your duty, you’re supposed to call a phone number to hear a recording to find out if the case you’re assigned to is still going forward as planned. After work, the day before my big day, I called to check.
It was cancelled.
My heart stopped. What do I do now? This mountain of a day that I had dreaded initially but had grown to badly need was gone. I still had the day booked off of work… I had resigned my budget to live without that amount of pay… And was it really fair for my boss to ban me from taking any time off for a full year after I started this job? Could this still be my chance to have a short reprieve from my daily hell?
I took the day off. I slept in a bit, I gathered up my laptop, and I went with my partner to Starbucks. His side project is a travel website that he’s been struggling to find time to work on, so I made myself productive. After two cappuccinos, I had a 900 word blog post roughly written. We changed venues, and at a pub I edited and published the article over a couple of beers. I felt happy again. The article did well, there was a noticeable spike in website views in the following weeks.
Unfortunately my day off was followed by reporting directly back to my dreaded job, and soon after by COVID-19 hitting Canada. As we all started thinking “This is more than rumors… This is serious…” I started thinking “ If I get this virus and die in this office, I will have wasted my life”.
The fear of a global pandemic causes primal responses, whether you believe you’ll get sick or not. I was overwhelmed by unhappiness in my career, exhaustion in my life, and now fear for the health parents too, who are at higher risk due to underlying conditions and whom I could no longer go check in on.
As our company struggled to transition to working from home, my distaste for them grew even more. I saw them fight against using technology, spread blatant misinformation sourced from Facebook, and treat those who were scared as if they were ridiculous. It was getting unbearable. Working from home was keeping me sane. The quarantine period dragged on, and I was starting to feel like I could bear this job.
After a while though, it became frowned upon to work from home. Pressure to return to the office was growing, and I realized it wasn’t worth it to me anymore. In an economic climate of job loss, pay cuts and shortened work weeks, I walked away from my job. The stress of the company I worked for, combined with pandemic stress and the glimmering memory of Jury Duty Day, all came together and exploded. My combined savings, along with what was left of my stock portfolio, would get me by for a few months. My partner agreed, and wanted more help on his blog project. He was able to find me some freelance writing work for other companies.
I got out. Freelance writing might be a long term career, or it might not be. The thought of going back to a job that puts more value on time served than quality of work is terrifying to me. I just hope I can keep this going and make a living at it.
