As anywhere, jury duty is painful where I live and although it may sound tempting to walk in with a noose and a bad attitude, you can be held in contempt of court if the judge feels you're just doing it to avoid jury duty. In my town we receive notifications telling us which week we may have to serve, but have to call the courthouse the Friday evening before to find out if we need to come in the following Monday. If not, we then have to call Monday night to find out if we have to show up on Tuesday. If not, Tuesday night we have to call in... you're getting the picture, right? To deal with this there are two things I've learned about jury selection in the USA over the years. Keep in mind this may not work everywhere, but it has always worked for me.
First of all, no new trials start after Wednesday. This means that if your jury number is high and you're not picked for Monday, there's a good chance you won't even have to show up for selection.
The second thing you can do is much easier and less time-consuming. Simply defer jury duty to the week of Thanksgiving or Christmas. Why? Because they don't start new trials those weeks.
But, as Sam said to Donna (who was trying to avoid jury duty) on The West Wing last week, "if you don't serve as a juror, you don't get to complain about the outcome of the OJ trial."