Suggested track to read this entry by: "Industrial Disease" by Dire Straits.
Alternative suggested track: Steve Goodman's "The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" by the Highwaymen.
Here's a lost notebook entry about the two days of actual work I managed to get done as a U.S. Census enumerator. I'm posting it just for a sense of completeness, and for a bit of an epiphany I experienced, which has little or nothing to do with the Census itself.
5/9
: Yesterday and the day before were my first days going out for the Census and trying to visit people at home. I went out with a slightly more experienced enumerator, who I will call Sawyer, because he reminds me absolutely nothing at all of the character on Lost. A nice enough guy.
We visited a little shack in one of the farms in South Phoenix, near The Farm, where a wonderful but expensive locavore restaurant called Quiessence is located. On these little side streets I saw more greenhouses and agriculture and horses and goats than I would have expected in Phoenix city limits.
The yards were all a mess, though. Like to spend some stimulus funds to clean 'em up, maybe replace these trailers with actual houses? Dream on, dude.
Our first and only informant that day was a feisty, talkative and somewhat lonely-seeming 70-something lady, who mentioned more than once that her son used to live with her but now he lives in Wesward Ho (a downtown hotel that I'm pretty sure has seen better days). We got into a bit of census minutiae, since she divides her time between two structures on the same piece of property. She described the other in great detail: furniture, dust, feral cats. She prefers her current digs now because of the AC, & this time of year who could blame her?
She used a lot of affection through aggression, talking a million miles per second and noting in passing that she had a lot of immediate problems weighing on her mind that she was taking out on poor Sawyer. But he got the info he needed.
At another locale, we met a man who seemed to speak only Spanish. He put in a call by cell to the owner of the place; Sawyer took down the number and made a date to call him later. Nine people living in, again, a shack, with Christmas lights still strung around the gutters. They looked like they'd been there for more than one Christmas.
Second day out we visited or revisited about 5 houses. Didn't actually talk to a resident. Sawyer let me fill out the forms this time, and we did get a couple of neighbors who were able to supply us with a little bit of info about the residents: phone numbers and such. So that was something.
It was a bit of an anticlimax, and possibly forgettable, but I need to note a conversation I had with Sawyer: a very intelligent, personable, and pretty well-informed guy. Between house calls we chatted about life, the universe, and everything. He mentioned that he and his wife like to read Wall Street/legal-sorta thrillers, which led me to ask him what he thought about the big story in the news at the time, Goldman Sachs. (Remember life before BP? Good times.)
Sawyer said, "Well, investing is risky." Yes, I said, but this wasn't risk, this was fraud. These were investments designed to fail, and asshats like "Fabulous Fab" were less than forthcoming to their clients, to say the least.
Sawyer wasn't buying it.
I'm not kidding. He didn't think it could possibly be that bad. "When I hear about something that dire, I decide I'm just going to wait for the investigation, because the stories we're getting are probably one-sided." Not quite his exact words, but that's the gist. He muttered something about conspiracy theories and rumors.
Aside from the question What investigation are you waiting for, that you think is going to actually take place?, I was floored, at this late date, by the notion that I feel insulated George W. Bush & Co. from a proper judgment in the minds of many millions of voters. It still continues, to some extent. People don't want to believe that things could go as wrong as they have.
I wish I were still in touch with Sawyer, here from my moving perch (in Minnesota now). I wonder what he thinks of BP.