PACKING THE COURT: A lot of your...

PACKING THE COURT: A lot of your co-workers getting called for jury duty? It’s the result of the county’s new jury system, which in 1993 more than doubled the number summoned the previous year. The trade-off is you don’t have to serve up to a month. In fact, most only serve one day. Now Superior Court administrator Alan Slater is sending out letters to businesses, appealing to them to help even more by being more generous in providing paid leave for workers on jury duty.

WAKE UP CALL: If you are chosen to serve on a jury, you’ll start your work day at 9 a.m.--unless you’re in Superior Court Judge William F. Rylaarsdam’s courtroom. Rylaarsdam’s jurors arrive at 8 a.m.--and not a minute late. But he runs his court without a lunch hour, so his jurors’ day ends at 1 p.m., while those in other courtrooms stay until 4:30 p.m. . . . Says Rylaarsdam, now on temporary assignment with the 4th District Court of Appeal: “My jurors tell me later that they really like those hours.”

RAM OR LAMB? Fast food magnate Carl Karcher, embroiled in a battle with his own board, had been scheduled for weeks to appear today on Dick Kazan’s KABC call-in radio talk show. But mid-week Kazan got the word: Karcher did not want to cancel , just postpone . Karcher is involved in delicate negotiations with the board over his contract. Says Kazan: “If they agree, he’ll come on to say how great things are. If they don’t, he may use my show for a battering ram.”

CLUTTERED MINDS? Do you work with folks whose desks are so piled with clutter they can’t see their desktop? And they always say, “But I know where everything is.” Dan Songer of Priority Management, an Irvine consulting firm, says about them: “They’re kidding themselves--and they know it.” Monday is “National Clean Off Your Desk Day” in the business world. Songer suggests it be taken seriously: “The average office worker spends 36 minutes a day just looking for things on the desk.”

Answering the Call

The county’s new jury system doubled the number of people summoned to serve last year (In thousands). ‘93*: 585

* Estimate

Source: Orange County Superior Court