Published: October 13, 2009 11:47 pm      

Jury still out on sound system at Cowboys' new stadium

GREENVILLE — Monday was a different kind of day.

Usually Monday’s are a 12-hour day for me and generally the roughest workday of the week. But not this week — I had jury duty.

Starting at 9 a.m. I spent most of my morning shuffling between one court and another. Along with 200 other of my Hunt County neighbors I was mustered into Judge Leonard’s courtroom. I did not stay there too long though as I was transferred and became Juror 16 for a potential civil trial in Judge Beacom’s courtroom. At one point the attorney asked us if we knew anyone who had gotten rich from a frivolous lawsuit? I leaned over to the lady next to me and said “Just a few lawyers.” Apparently that caught the lawyer’s attention because he then said to me,” Would you have any problem awarding millions of dollars in judgment Mr. Vulcan?” I didn’t think I had pointy ears but I kinda liked being thought of as logical but still I corrected him that the name was Walker.

At about 4 p.m., I was still sweating it out as they named the 12 jurors. When they skipped me I could have kissed whichever attorney vetoed me.

Then it was time for a change of scenery. When I got out of jury duty, I picked up my wife and headed for Arlington for the U2 concert.

That stadium is huge and we were nine rows from the very top. Talk about vertigo, that place is worse than the Grand Canyon. The seats are almost completely vertical at that point and you almost have to climb a ladder to get there.

Once the opening act begin, I knew our seats were a mistake. The sound bounces off the top of the stadium and is almost unintelligible. I bet there are a good 20,000 disgruntled people that will never go to a concert there again. It was worse than awful.

So being enterprising and feeling a little lucky from having escaped jury duty, we decided to head for lower seats. There were guards stationed at every level to make sure financial segregation was enforced, but we found a distracted guard and slipped through to near the floor and thoroughly enjoyed the show from there. The concert was a great mix of old and new music — I’m not sure I have ever heard a rock group sing Amazing Grace.

After the concert, I can’t tell you how many people I heard complaining of the sound — the people that put on the show should be ashamed for charging people an outrageous price for such garbage and then not letting people move to the hundreds of open seats lower down.