There are a lot of glamorous things people imagine about living abroad.

They picture café mornings in Bogotá. Weekend flights to somewhere beautiful. A lower cost of living. Better weather. Less stress. More freedom. They picture themselves walking through a new city feeling slightly wiser and significantly more interesting than they did back home.

What they do not picture is this:

You’re living in Colombia. You open a scanned letter from a relative’s house in North Carolina. And it says you’ve been summoned for jury duty in a county you’ve never actually lived in.

Not next month in some abstract way.
Not “sometime this year.”
Not “if you’re available.”

No. A specific date. A specific morning. A specific courtroom. A specific obligation.

And you are 2,500 miles away.

That is exactly the kind of expat moment nobody includes in the fantasy.

Because living abroad doesn’t just reveal new cultures. It reveals old systems that still think they own your calendar.

And that’s the thing most people don’t understand until they’ve actually lived outside their home country for a while: moving abroad does not mean you’ve disappeared from the machinery. It just means the machinery now reaches for you across borders.

Sometimes quietly.
Sometimes bureaucratically.
Sometimes with a QR code.

And in my case, that QR code led directly into one of the dumbest little modern bureaucratic adventures I’ve had in a while.

I got a jury summons in Randolph County, North Carolina.

There was only one problem.

I have never lived in Randolph County.

For more than 30 years, my home base in North Carolina was Guilford County. Greensboro. That was the center of gravity. That was where life happened. That was the home county, the real one, the one that made sense.

Randolph County was never part of that story.

But last year, when I renewed my North Carolina driver’s license, I used a relative’s address because I no longer maintain a home in the United States. That relative happens to live in Randolph County.

And that, apparently, is enough.

Because government systems are simple in the way only powerful systems can be simple. They don’t need your life story. They don’t ask follow-up questions. They don’t pause for nuance. They see an address, connect a few databases, and build a reality from there.

Driver’s license address? Randolph County.
Mailing address? Randolph County.
Probably a vehicle tied to North Carolina, too? Great.
Close enough. Put him in the pool.

That’s the thing with bureaucracy: it does not ask, “Where do you actually live?” It asks, “What do we currently have on file?”

Those are not the same question.

And if you live abroad long enough, you discover that a shocking amount of your life is controlled by the second one.

This is one of the most under-discussed parts of expat life.

People think in physical terms. They think if you leave the U.S., you’ve left the U.S. And physically, sure, of course you have. You’re not there. You’re somewhere else. You’re paying rent in Bogotá, or Lisbon, or Chiang Mai. You’ve got groceries in another language. Your daily life runs on a different clock.

But systems don’t care where your coffee is.

They care where your records are.

If you still have a U.S. driver’s license, you are in the DMV system.
If you still have a car registered there, you are in that system too.
If your bank still has a U.S. mailing address, that system knows you through that address.
If your insurance, voting registration, tax records, or family-based mailing setup still point somewhere in the States, the machine still sees you.

And the machine is not sentimental.

It does not say, “Well, he probably means to be abroad permanently, let’s use common sense.”
It says, “This is the address. Proceed.”

That’s how you end up in Bogotá being summoned to court in a county you’ve never actually called home.

Not because someone targeted you.
Not because anyone is malicious.
Because databases are literal and lazy at the same time.

They are happy to be wrong with confidence.

Now here’s where the story goes from mildly annoying to properly ridiculous.

The summons had a QR code so I could request an excuse online.

That sounds modern. Efficient. Streamlined. Very 2026-coded government behavior. Scan the code, fill out the form, explain the issue, done.

Except when I scanned it from Colombia, the website was blocked.

Blocked.

Not glitchy.
Not slow.
Not “please try again later.”
Blocked.

So now imagine the scene properly.

I am sitting in Bogotá, summoned for jury duty in North Carolina, in a county I’ve never lived in, trying to access the official court excuse process, and the official process will not load from the country where I am currently living.

That is an aggressively specific kind of absurdity.

So what do you do?

You VPN your way into the North Carolina judicial system so you can explain that you do not, in fact, currently reside in the jurisdiction that thinks it owns your morning.

And yes, that worked.

But take a step back for a second and look at how stupid that is.

If you’re older, less technical, unfamiliar with VPNs, or just unlucky enough to assume government websites should function from outside the country, what then?

Do you think the site is broken?
Do you give up?
Do you fail to respond?
Do you risk penalties because the system required a digital response from a digital portal that your physical location could not access?

That’s the part people don’t think about when they talk about how easy everything is now.

Digital systems are only convenient when they remember that humans move.

A lot of them still haven’t noticed.

Now let’s talk about the money, because this is where jury duty stops being quaint civic ritual and starts feeling like an accounting error.

The jury summons was for a North Carolina county court appearance at 8:40 in the morning.

Let’s say, for the sake of comedy and catastrophe, that they had denied my excuse.

What would I have had to do?

Buy a plane ticket from Bogotá back to North Carolina.

Depending on timing, routing, and whether you wanted to preserve a little human dignity in the seat selection process, that round trip could run anywhere from roughly $500 to $1,200.

And the compensation for showing up to jury duty?

Twelve dollars.

Not twelve dollars an hour.
Twelve dollars for the day.

That number is incredible in the worst possible way.

It has the energy of a government saying, “We understand your sacrifice and would like to honor it with approximately one sandwich.”

If you stop and do the math, it gets even funnier.

At $12 per day, you would need 75 days of service just to cover a $900 plane ticket.

Seventy-five.

So if North Carolina had forced me to fly home to fulfill jury duty, I would have effectively been paying a huge amount of money to access the privilege of earning less than the cost of airport coffee.

That’s not compensation. That’s satire.

And this is before you even consider lost time, disrupted work, lodging if needed, and the fact that many people summoned for jury duty aren’t salaried employees whose income smoothly continues in the background while they perform civic duty.

A lot of people are self-employed. A lot are contractors. A lot are hourly workers. A lot run their own businesses. A lot live in the real world, where absence has a price tag.

Let me be clear here, because people get weirdly defensive on behalf of institutions.

Jury duty matters.

It’s one of the few ways ordinary people directly participate in the justice system. That part is not fake. It is a real civic responsibility. It matters that courts have jurors. It matters that cases are heard by more than just professionals inside the machine. It matters that regular citizens show up.

All of that is true.

But something else is also true:

Civic duty does not erase financial reality.

And right now, the country tends to talk about the first truth while quietly ignoring the second.

Because the burden of jury duty is not equal.

If you’re retired, local, financially comfortable, and flexible, jury duty may be annoying but manageable.

If you’re hourly, self-employed, caregiving, traveling, living abroad, running a small business, or carrying a schedule that collapses when you disappear, jury duty is not just “an inconvenience.” It can become an actual logistical and economic problem.

A system can be important and still badly designed around real life.

Those two things are allowed to coexist.

This is where the transcript made a point I really liked, because it zooms out from my own little North Carolina absurdity and asks a much bigger question:

What happens when jury duty isn’t one day?

What happens when it becomes a major trial?

The Sean Combs trial in New York ran for about eight weeks.

Eight weeks.

New York’s juror pay sounds better than North Carolina’s at first glance: around $40 per day.

That feels more respectable until you stop being emotionally manipulated by the word forty and actually multiply it.

Forty court days at $40 per day gives you $1,600 total.

For eight weeks of your life.

Now imagine you are self-employed. Or missing work. Or trying to maintain a business while trapped inside a high-profile case with a full courtroom schedule, media attention, and potentially restricted outside communication.

That $1,600 begins to feel less like payment and more like a historical reenactment of compensation.

And if there’s sequestration or hotel coordination or anything beyond basic local commuting, the economics get even sillier.

This is the part most people don’t say out loud: a lot of jury systems still operate as if every juror has a 1958-style life.

As if everyone has one employer, one local address, one stable routine, no international complications, and a financial structure that can absorb sudden civic interruptions without consequence.

That world is gone.

The paperwork has not caught up.

To North Carolina’s credit, once I got through the digital nonsense, the actual human response was reasonable.

I didn’t ignore the summons.

That would have been dumb.

Ignoring government mail is not a life strategy. It is, at best, a procrastination strategy with legal seasoning.

So I used a VPN, got into the court system, found the excuse form, and submitted it.

The next day, they emailed back asking for documentation of out-of-country residence.

Fair enough.

So I sent what any rational person living abroad would send:

My Colombian cédula.
My Colombian visa.
My passport photo page.
Entry and exit evidence.
And, because it felt relevant, a screenshot of their own website being blocked in Colombia.

I also included my YouTube channel, because if anyone still doubted that I actually live abroad, I figured several years of content about living in Colombia might help make the case.

At that point, if I were faking it, I would have to admire my own level of commitment.

And then I said something that was half joke, half truth:

That it would absolutely be a hardship to buy an airline ticket just to appear for jury duty—but if North Carolina wanted to buy me the plane ticket, I’d do it.

Because honestly? At this point in life, the experience itself would probably be interesting.

That part was not entirely a joke.

Ten minutes later, they replied and excused me.

No drama. No threats. No American legal thriller soundtrack swelling in the background. Just a normal message saying that after reviewing the request and attachments, I was eligible to be excused.

That was the end of it.

Efficient, once I reached an actual human layer.

Which is often the story with modern bureaucracy: the people are usually far more reasonable than the systems that guard access to them.

This story isn’t really about getting out of jury duty.

It’s about the illusion a lot of people have when they move abroad.

The illusion is this: that physical relocation equals administrative relocation.

It does not.

You can physically relocate in a weekend.

Legally and systemically, that can take years—or may never happen at all if you don’t deliberately change things.

If you want to truly sever state-level ties in the U.S., you usually need to do more than buy a one-way ticket and post a nice airport story.

You may need to change or surrender a driver’s license.
Re-register vehicles.
Update mailing structures.
Change insurance.
Handle domicile carefully.
Think through tax implications.
Make sure old records no longer suggest a life you do not actually live.

And if you’re not ready to do that, which is completely valid, then understand what comes with it:

The system still sees you.

Not emotionally.
Administratively.

It sees your address.
It sees your license.
It sees your car.
It sees your paperwork.
And every now and then it will act on that reality, even if your actual life is 2,500 miles south.

That’s the tether.

Most of the time it’s harmless.
Sometimes it’s annoying.
Occasionally, it sends you to jury duty in a county you’ve never lived in.

The bigger point here is not “be afraid of the system.”

It’s this: understand the difference between living abroad and being fully untangled from your old legal footprint.

Those are separate projects.

And if you know that in advance, you make better decisions.

You think more carefully about which address you use.
You think more carefully about what records still point where.
You think more carefully about whether your setup is temporary, semi-permanent, or truly transitioned.

That doesn’t mean you have to rush into cutting every tie back home.

A lot of people shouldn’t. A lot of people need some of those ties. A lot of people are in transition for years. That’s normal.

But clarity helps.

If you know you still exist in multiple systems, then when one of them reaches out, you’re annoyed—but not surprised.

That’s a much better place to live from.

One of the strangest parts of expat life is realizing that the hardest part isn’t always the foreign country.

Sometimes it’s your own country, still trying to interact with a version of you that no longer exists.

The version that had a local address.
The version that lived in one state full-time.
The version that could casually appear at a courthouse on a Tuesday morning without crossing an ocean.

That version may be gone.

But if your records still describe him, some system somewhere will continue to believe in him with absolute confidence.

And that’s what happened here.

I moved abroad.
The records didn’t fully move with me.
The system saw an address, made assumptions, and sent a summons.

No villain. No conspiracy. No scandal.

Just a perfect little reminder that in modern life, your paperwork can lag years behind your reality.

And if you live abroad long enough, sooner or later, reality and paperwork are going to meet in a very stupid room.

In my case, that room was called jury duty.