I was summoned for jury duty Tuesday. It was my third time so far, and while I didn’t mind serving, I knew ahead of time I wouldn’t get picked. Prosecutors never like me. I’m too sympathetic, and my wimpy voice always gives them the jitters, as in, “Oh God. This women would let Dahmer off for his nice eyes.”

So as expected, I was released after the fourth round of questions.

Before it got to that point, while I was sitting in the waiting room, a nicely dressed woman a bit older than myself struck up a conversation with me.

Since we are in Michigan, we naturally got to talking about the job situation. We commiserated about the fact that you can get an advanced degree from a good college and still have to buy a hairnet if you’re lucky enough to find work—which you often won’t be. We talked about the disappearance of middle management jobs, and the move toward contract work to get corporations out of paying benefits and unemployment. The squeeze is relentless, and it continues as I write.

She told me about her husband, who had been an administrator for a top local hospital and was laid off two years ago as he approached his 62nd birthday. The hospital had no problem with his job performance, he was liked and respected there. It was all about money and nothing more. They decided to eliminate much of his work and put the rest on a younger, cheaper employee.

It made financial sense, but he’d worked there for well over 20 years and had expected to retire from the place. It felt like a betrayal, and though no contract was ever signed guaranteeing anything, a breach of trust had definitely occurred. He picked up a bit of subcontract work here and there for a while, but finally they had to dip into their savings to buy him health insurance until he could qualify for Medicare.

She’d just come back from Europe, so it was clear they had some money. Still, her story was typical and disturbing. I told her about my eight years in call centers believing the line about getting off the phones and how I finally gave up (thank God) when I collapsed at my desk with an apparent heart attack in 2008. I told her the story about the 3 minute per day pee time allotment.

“That will give you cancer,” she said.

Then she told me about how she had developed cancer late in life and realized her job was making her sick. She decided that she’d worked enough, whether or not society thought so or was willing to subsidize her early retirement. She recovered, and never went back.

“What did you do when you were working?” I asked.

It turned out she was CEO of a large company here in town.

“Wow. I bet that paid better than call center work,” I said stupidly, immediately regretting it.

“Yes I imagine it probably did,” she laughed.

Rich people scare me, but she was nice, and not just that, we had a lot more in common than I would have thought. And I liked her. I wondered if I would have liked her if I’d been working in her call center. I wondered whether her company even had a call center. (I gathered not. She was fairly appalled at my description of the job and all the highly skilled, professional people reduced to doing it.)

Inside the court room, on the jury bench, a young man was on trial for resisting arrest—not by fighting, pushing, threatening violence, or anything overtly harmful, but by questioning the officer who stopped him. The officer was now pressing charges. The defendant was both Hispanic and black, and he was clearly having one of the least good days in his life.

The prosecutor announced that this trial would take only a day, if that, and that such a short trial was rare, so we jurors should consider ourselves lucky. He boasted we’d be done that same day, most likely, broadly hinting that convicting this guy would take no more than an hour or two.

As he proceeded, it was clear to me that he intended to pack the jury with authoritarian personalities who believed you should never say ‘boo’ to the police, especially if you are brown, not even if they are whacking you over the head with something. You should work all that out later, down at the station.

That’s a prosecutor’s job, to send people to jail, and for all I know this kid had killed four old ladies that week alone, but then again, he might not have done anything, ever, except to say ‘boo’ to a local cop. Technically, no, you shouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a cop. On the other hand, I have a CEO uncle who got off after rigging bids to build faulty nuclear reactors. Who is the bigger menace to society? Everything is relative I guess.

Not to a criminal prosecutor it isn’t.

One thing is certain: This kid was going to be a LOT easier to convict than any CEO.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the ‘quick’ one day trial didn’t even have a jury by the time I was dismissed early that afternoon, because a number of jurors felt that cops should be able to handle people who say ‘boo’ to them without burdening the criminal justice system with insults to their authority—and all of those jurors kept getting dismissed. Everyone looked massively uncomfortable.

On the way home it hit me how bad things really are here economically, and how we don’t see it so much because we don’t talk to each other in person. Most of the people there were either out of work or had only just gotten new work and were terrified of losing it. All backgrounds, all races, all income levels were represented, but the two things we all had in common were 1) no job, and 2) no hope of a job.

Honestly, it made me wonder if things wouldn’t change in a hurry if we all got off the internet for awhile and spent some time in a small room face to face with nothing to do but chat.

I think we’d convict. And that brown kid would NOT be the one thrown in jail.