Reply to Petit jury duty summons for 14 days - during planned vacation this summer

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think she's trying to say that she'd rather cancel the vacation than defer and have to eat up even more leave when the deferral date arrives.

So sorry OP.  It sucks but you're doing the right thing.  Don't dip into your emergency fund, don't eat leave, just cancel the vacation.  Perhaps the gift giver can arrange something else?  [/quote]

I appreciate your sympathy. But you and many others are misunderstanding one important thing.

There are two separate issues. One is that I will have to cancel my vacation. The reason I'm canceling is that I have already called. I can put in a request to defer IN WRITING but I can't find out if it has been accepted or not until 10 days before the service was supposed to start. If I wait until then to cancel my vacation, I will lose all of the deposits and have no opportunity to reschedule it. If I cancel now, i will only lose some deposits, and may be able to use the vacation another time. I haven't given up, it's that i cannot deal with the uncertainty.

The second and more important issue is that I will be eating into my leave one way or another. I do not get short term disability for childbirth because I have a small employer. My "maternity" leave will consist of unpaid leave, plus any leave I have accumulated. I've been working there long enough that this is four weeks of paid vacation. If I have to use nearly two weeks of it for jury duty, that means I will only have two weeks of maternity leave that can be "paid leave" when the time comes.

Do people not understand how that's a huge burden? And if so, I wonder how much time YOU took off when you had a baby? We've saved up to basically afford about 8 weeks, four of which would be vacation time and four of which would be unpaid time off. I can't afford any more than that.

If I have to take 2 of those four weeks of paid leave and use them for jury duty, AND on top of that, dip into emergency funds for a babysitter, (I do shift work, so we don't use child care when I'm working as DH is home, this would not be the case for jury duty) then I'm screwed. I won't really be able to take any leave at all when baby comes.

I do think this is certainly a burden, and undue hardship. I'm obviously going to try hard to defer, and I truly hoping the court will allow the excuse but I"m afraid they won't, given how inflexible they were the last time I tried to defer (which was the fifth time I served). DC is really not being flexible on hardship at all anymore, they just apparently don't have enough people, so they'll force you to do it even if you really can't. It's awful and it IS abusive.

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