On jury duty, Mayor Garcetti passes time by Tweeting
The lunch-hour threat on Twitter was blunt: “If the rubbish can doesn’t get picked up by Wednesday as promised, I’m dumping my trash in front of the mayor’s house.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who keeps watch on Twitter traffic that mentions his name, was on jury duty Monday when he saw the message from Lorie B. du Preez, aka @LoricidexDoom on Twitter. He typed a personal reply.
“Hey there — send us the address and we will see what happened,” Garcetti told du Preez, whose Twitter profile reads: “The Martha Stewart of Madness. Individual, freespeaker and thinker, spits fire, and walking ticking timebomb.”
She told Garcetti that she already called the city’s 311 hotline and had been promised a pickup within 48 hours.
“Truck should be on the way,” Garcetti tweeted back.
Many politicians leave it to professional public relations staffers to tweet on their behalf. But Garcetti — to the chagrin of his PR staff — has a habit of responding personally to random messages on the Samsung smartphone he carries.
When a screenwriter tweeted a complaint in July about getting a ticket for honking to show support for protesters, Garcetti told him on Twitter to “send us the info tomorrow and let us help you get it resolved.” A spokesman was left to explain later that the mayor was not taking sides against the LAPD.
On Monday, jury duty brought out Garcetti’s chatty side.
“Hey man,” Adam Countee — @adamcountee — tweeted to the mayor shortly after the rubbish threat came in. “Can u do something about the Whole Foods parking lot on Santa Monica and Fairfax?”
The perpetually jammed lot was a problem that Garcetti knew he couldn’t solve: He urged Countee to send a tweet to a West Hollywood councilman, John Duran.
“I believe it is West Hollywood,” Garcetti told Countee, who describes himself on Twitter as a former “jump ball possession arrow operator.”
Garcetti also paid tribute Monday to the famous car dealer who died Sunday: “RIP, Cal Worthington, a Southern California icon,” he tweeted.
At the end of the day, Garcetti snapped a photo of the certificate saying that he had completed jury duty. And then he posted it — where else? — on Twitter.
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