Jury duty put me in a room with eleven strangers and a vending machine that only accepted exact change, which by hour four had become the single unifying crisis of the entire panel. "Does anyone have a quarter," a man in a Members Only jacket asked for what had to be the sixth time, to a room that had by then pooled its collective coin reserves and come up eleven cents short of a bag of pretzels. A retired teacher named Doreen finally cracked the case by remembering she had an old subway token in her purse from a trip to New York a decade earlier, which, against all logic, the machine accepted without complaint. "It worked," she announced, holding the pretzels aloft like a trophy, and the entire room actually applauded, eleven strangers who'd spent the morning in total silence suddenly bonded over a decade-old subway token beating a vending machine at its own game. We got called into the courtroom twenty minutes later, and I never saw any of them again…..no case assignment, no follow-up, just eleven people who briefly had one shared purpose and then scattered back into their separate lives. I think about that room sometimes, oddly. Not the case I almost sat on. Just Doreen, holding pretzels over her head like she'd just won something bigger than a dollar fifty of vending machine snacks. She probably doesn't remember me at all. I still remember her name.