Odd/Old Computing System for Jury Duty

[tn3270]

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about my jury duty. One other thing is worth mentioning: the courts must have an old/odd computer system(s). In a couple of weeks we all get a slip in the mail saying we did our jury duty and that cannot be called for another 3 years. This is fine. They also said that we need to keep this slip in case we get called by mistake in the next 3 years. They said we must keep the slip because they do not have a record of who served after 3 months. One odd thing about this is how do they know who to send out summons to if they do not have a record of who has not served within the last 3 years. It sounds like maybe the people who handle complaints do no have access to the system that has the information. Perhaps the system is real buggy. Another possibility is they tell a fib to encourage people to save the slip. I would save the slip anyhow, but this seemed odd to me.

Comments

my guess?

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

they think the 'way to do this' is to keep a list of dates and who served. After three months they prune the list to save space


It probably didn't occur to anyone to put a little date field in with whatever address info they're using to get people that says 'last served'

but then.... maybe they're not using their own database to do that. maybe they're using data maintained primarily for someother purpose (local taxes, voter records or something) and every day they say to those people 'spit me out a random list of N names' and _can't_ piggy back a 'last served' field since it's not 'their' data

[siderea]

I received a summons just shy of a year after serving, so it really is the case that they don't keep the information around, and expect you to.

I think it's a case of really old iron, from the days when disk space was dear, and they don't keep that info around for three years, because, once upon a time, it was too expensive to.