While you read this account of working life, why not open another Firefox tab and enjoy some great more-or-less-on-topic tunes?
"Senses Working Overtime" by XTC
"Secretarial" by A.C. Newman
"Dear Employee" by the Papercuts
Many people continue to be curious about the 2010 U.S. Census. At more or less the same time I worked Saturday shifts for the Census data-processing contractor Vangent, I also worked Monday-Friday in the downtown Phoenix, Arizona U.S. Census office as a recruitment clerk and would-be enumerator.
Mundane though it is, and at the risk of unloading TMI, here is the rest of what I saw of the 2010 Census. You’re welcome, posterity.
(And to add one more song:
("Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks" by The National)
At first I'd assumed that the Vangent jobs were the Census jobs. The people who run the Phoenix Census office eventually told my orientation group that a lot of other people thought so too. In fact, they were miffed that Vangent mailed a postcard to its applicants, which said that all jobs were filled but thanks for asking.
That Vangent postcard (which I never saw, for the record) used the U.S. Census logo, and apparently confused a lot of people into believing that the Census was no longer hiring. It made the Census people very unhappy, since they themselves were trying to recruit. The U.S. government had to work a little harder to get the word out. I didn't know that the Census proper was hiring till I saw a notice on my credit union’s website, which I was checking maybe every half hour or so to see if I still had any money.
So in February I applied for a job as a Census-taker. In early March I got a call, explaining that every applicant needs, among other things, to take a multiple-choice test. The caller from the Census made an appointment for me a few days away, at a Baptist church a few blocks from where I live. She also steered me towards a practice version of the test on the Census website.
I thought there might be an interview, too, so I sort-of dressed up. The guy who gave the test (proctor, they call it) was wearing sandals and looked like he was ready to go to India to find himself.
The test wasn’t too hard. They told us we could stick around to get our scores. I scored 100%. Which is unusual, because I never get 100% on anything. Most of the people I eventually ended up working with scored 95%-100%, so I no longer felt so special.
I'd expected a follow-up interview but a week or so later was offered the job on the phone. I'd expected I was gonna be an "enumerator" (Census taker) @ $15/hr., but no such luck yet. They needed recruiters at $11/hr. It seemed a bit of bait-and-switch, but I was happy to be working.
Orientation lasted four days. It consisted largely of any of three otherwise nice people reading to us verbatim from the same government manual we’d been given. One of our trainers veered from the script, though, and actually told us what was going on. He said the Census was facing a shortage of enumerators, partly because of the misleading Vangent mailing about jobs, and partly because of the extension of unemployment benefits.
"In a state with at least 10% unemployment, you’d think the phones would be ringing," he said, opening the door to a dead-silent office. "Hear any phones?"
That was about to change, though. We were put to work stapling rubber bands to brochures for peripatetic recruiters to hang to doorknobs in targeted neighborhoods. One of those flyers made it to the doorknob of our local Fox News tee-vee show affiliate. A reporter and camera-operator came in to do a story. You can glimpse me happily stapling rubber bands to brochures, serene in the belief that the Fox camera is aimed over my head and that there is no way in hell that I will be seen on TV. Next morning, a couple of friends, not to mention some new colleagues, let me know they’d seen me. They also interviewed one of my co-workers, Lourdes, whose name the Fox News captioner spelled with a Z.
In this crazy high-tech Twitter-a-go-go world, brochures hung off doorknobs by rubber bands are perhaps an overlooked form of promotion. This stuff actually worked. The phone started ringing, and the sleazy guy from Office Space relieved me of my stapler. For the next three weeks, I took as many as fifty calls a day from people who wanted to be enumerators. Some of them really, really wanted to be enumerators.
You might expect a federal office to be a sleek, clean, 2001: A Space Odyssey-antiseptic affair. So I was surprised by what a boiler-room operation the Phoenix Census office is. Forget NCIS; think The Wire. Office furniture and shelves were strewn this way and that. Boxes were stacked everywhere, seemingly at random, often exceeding six feet in height, and so tightly as to leave only narrow passages between (for example) my own work station and the nearest exit. Foot traffic was hazardous. Collisions were rife. What, I wondered, would an OSHA inspection show.
Just to get running water, we had to exit past our long-suffering security officer, let alone to visit the rest-room. Other amenities were at best Spartan. I observed two trays of glazed, vaguely spiral or pretzel-shaped bagged pastries called "Snacks: 50 cents." Which could only flash me back to an MST3K-style, "Ooh, don't tempt me!"
The phone crew had no computers, not even one to share. The phones were a pain in the ass to use. While the user dialed a number, the phone would wail and warble with busy signals even if you were dialing correctly. You needed to dial 9 to get out, and 1 for long-distance, so mistaken calls to 911 were not unheard of. At least that mistake I managed to avoid. The sound quality was awful even at the best of times; every call was constantly being interrupted by call-waiting signals from, it seemed, every other phone in the office. They made the job more difficult. Plenty of callers used their cellphones from moving vehicles. Often called from home with children shouting in the background. Many spoke in accents that demanded a little extra listening. Better sound quality would have made the job easier. Heckuva job, Siemens.
Above my work station was a cat calendar, the March kitty peering over the rim of a wicker basket. To this I attached a caption: IM IN UR SENSUS, COUNTIN UR PEEPULZ. Two days later, a LOLcats fan noticed it, and I no longer felt so alone. Two weeks later, the calendar was commandeered by a superior clerk, and the next time I saw it the caption was removed. I’ll skip other instances of garden-variety petty office fascism, expect to note that this was the first time since high school that I was told, during times of slow work flow: "Look busy." Quote/unquote, more than twice.
The head of Phoenix Census Operations could often be seen standing around watching. Was he making sure people were working? Or, more charitably, was he taking in the feel of his crew and ship a la Kirk, Picard, or Jack Aubrey? I prefer to think the latter.
Some of my co-workers were pretty cool. Brenda said when she and Laura and Joel spoke Spanish among themselves, I should not feel left out, which was nice of her. She also said that they are speaking three different kinds of Spanish, and comparing notes about different ways to say things. "It’s as if we all spoke English," she said, "but one of us was from England, one from Australia, and one from America." Laura and a friend of hers are starting a biz selling cinnamon-roasted nuts, called "Moms Gone Nuts." Lourdes-with-an-S became an American citizen one Wednesday.
Most incoming calls were from people who’d seen one of our doorknob hangers, or gotten a new and official Census postcard in the mail, or even seen me on TV. We had a script to work from. A person would ask about the job. I would walk them through the procedure: tell them about the test, ask them for two forms of ID: a driver’s license or a passport, and a Social Security card or a birth certificate—oh, the questions callers asked.
Then I would make an appointment at one of the many floating testing locations. This was tougher than it sounds, since there was no rhyme, reason, pattern, or regularity to what day or time a particular location (donated, usually by a nonprofit group) would be available. Rather than do a search on a handy Excel or Word list, or even check out a map on the Google, we had only printed address lists arranged alphabetically, to supplement printed schedules that were continually and consistently updated by hand according to shouted command or office rumor. It made for unwieldy working.
"Bear with me; the federal government didn’t give me a computer" was usually enough to get an understanding chuckle from the caller. And for most people, I was able to find a time and place that made them happy in, oh, seven to ten minutes. Others still could not comprehend why I did not have all the necessary information at the keyboard I did not have.
There were city maps on every wall, but few of them were very useful. They either took in too much or too little territory, or were nth-generation photocopies faded to ghostly hieroglyphics.
We also were scripted to ask applicants to arrive half an hour before the actual scheduled testing time. I didn’t even have the time to ask the reasoning behind that one.
Saying the same thing over and over, even in my own words, led to a tied-up tongue. One morning it was all I could do to stop answering the phone: "U.S. Senate, can I help you?"
It wasn’t unusual for callers to ask if a felony conviction barred them from employment. Answer: Everybody got background-checked, including me; brushes with the law were reviewed on a case-by-case basis. I tell this with some reluctance. Next on "Hannity": Convicted felons, knocking on your door? Give them what they want or you could go to jail? Under Barack Hussein Obama, the answer is...Yes!
We also took calls from people who had already taken the test and wanted to know if they were still candidates. Some had waited six months for a callback; others no more than 12 hours, hardly enough time for even a background check. Often I heard something like: "I’m eligible, aren’t I? I passed the test; I got a 70." When I got the chance, I explained that except for a preference for veterans, the Census based hiring on test scores, but there was no rule against taking the test more than once. I always suggested that low-scorers try again; I got takers maybe half the time.
And, to my surprise, we were asked to make calls: To remind people the day before testing of when and where to show up, and also to give no-shows another chance. The amount of hand-holding surprised me, but gave me a sense of how desperate the Census was to hire.
I tended to assume that people who worked there longer than I knew more than I did. I was always shocked to find that wasn’t necessarily the case. Even when I did find a person who could help me on Monday, he or she might be doing something completely different on Tuesday. Fractions of people did fractions of tasks, cutting multitasking pretty thin.
A note circulated one Friday for the weekend staff said we had 900 applicants now and needed 2,000 by Sunday. By Monday we’d reached 1,600 but the big boss called a huddle to congratulate the weekend workers. A couple days later the sign said 1,800 were reached. I thought I heard the scrape of goalposts being moved.
One exception to the general sense of disarray: We were carefully and repeatedly reminded that private information about U.S. citizens is sacred and confidential, and must never leave the facility in any form. Giant bins of paper destined for the shredder attested to this.
Some callers brought out my inner Republican (sorry, but I do have one). Some callers sounded like their spouse or parent (or both) were holding a gun to their head, so unenthusiastic did they sound about applying. Some callers didn’t want to be bothered to travel a block beyond their home to take the test. It wasn’t unusual for applicants to call frantically from their speeding autos five minutes before testing, desperately wanting to know where to go to take the test. A few had the neurons to claim we never gave them info we routinely give out, like the address or name of the facility, or the time they were expected.
A few callers brought out my Inner Bitter Secretary. I know now to be nicer to call-center people (or how to drive them crazy, depending on my intentions). I lost Boise a couple of times. Accidents happen. I’m just a trainee here.
I had some fascinating conversations: Yes, I did talk to a mom who called to sign up her son. "I'm not worried about the test; I have a 4.0 GPA." (He had a felony conviction, too.) "I don't speak bilingual." Maybe you need to know Phoenix to appreciate "I don’t like to go to the Avenues." I guess I haven’t lived here long enough to realize there was some kind of Minneapolis-versus-St. Paul snobbery going on. "I will call you back at my earliest conveniency." Returning a call to an applicant, whose dad answers: "What's the deal here? You're making it sound like some kinda big federal job!" And a moment of zen: "You know why I didn’t hear you? Because I didn’t answer the phone."
And just so you know it wasn’t just the callers themselves who were nuts, I often felt like I’d stumbled into The Office:
Somebody actually said "Right on." A media student who looked a bit like Joss Whedon was incensed to be told to look busy or he'd be fired: "I’m doing a clerical job. What else can you do to me?" One person (who did have a computer) reported an interesting result from her spell-check: "Elevators [suggested replacement for ‘enumerators’] will be knocking on doors." "I love ketchup, but I would never put ketchup on a hotdog." "I wonder how that guy gets along with [air quotes] people. This isn’t the Army." "He says they broke into his car and stole his planner. Yeah, there’s a huge black market for planners." "This is a merit system." I caught the IT guy, working on a Dell, looking longingly at the Apple website.
For wingnuts: There has been so much nonsense spoken about the Census by lunatics with media platforms. This place isn't organized enough to support a conspiracy. I did not meet a single agent of the shadowy, all-powerful S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.Y.D.R.A.-rivaling organization known as A.C.O.R.N. Though admittedly I could not ask everybody. There are no goddam re-education camps.
My colleague Brenda observed that the Census recruiting process resembled a kind of grass-roots government. Given the obstacles and apparent lack of funding, it was fairly impressive. As unwieldy and chaotic as it was, it was also more efficient than you'd think. We got a mixed bag of applicants, but generally intelligent and motivated. In the office, I wouldn't say we captured every demographic niche, but was quite a mix of the sexes, ages, and ethnicities. It looked like, well, America.
That said, it was one of the more disorganized places I've worked. If I’d had a computer, I would have circulated a sheet to collect names, departments, and phone extensions to organize on an Excel sheet and print out to serve as a phone list for the office. (No, we did not even have an office phone list.) Not that departure from procedure was actively encouraged, but it might have given me something to do during those "look busy" times. Instead I took the notes on which I base this report.
I would have killed to Google maps or send email reminders. A phone headset would have rocked, too.
As at Vangent, I met a lot of people who seemed overqualified for the task at hand. Including a couple of teachers, I should point out.
Quinn Martinesque Epilogue:
After a month in the office, I was told one Friday that it was my last day; I would be called next week to be trained as an enumerator. Two weeks later, I got the call. Training was held in the back of the Tempe Goodwill, past the racks of used books and vinyl records, past the restroom, past the huge chamber where Goodwill employees (volunteers?) sort through donated clothes and junk in giant bins, in one corner of the lunchroom, which smelled like a giant belch. (OK, that could have been me.) Our trainer tried to get us a slightly less distracting location, but this was the best the Census could get. She breezed through some rather dry material with good humor and grace, then pronounced us fit to enumerate.
The next day I got a call from an enumerator in Tempe who took me with him on his rounds. Just in time for a late heat wave, to say nothing of epidemic bad vibes over recent actions by the state legislature. In two days and perhaps ten stops at homes, we talked to one person we found at home. Given my experience on political campaigns, that sounded about right. I did learn the follow-up procedure, which included leaving a Notification of Visit form. We were not allowed to even put it in the mailbox—even that is against the law, Michelle, Glenn.
My colleague too pronounced me fit to enumerate. I asked him what I should do next. He didn’t know. I should call my team leader. I didn’t know who that was. I put in a call to the central Phoenix office and was told they were reorganizing the teams; I could expect a call Monday. Monday I visited the office and was told that what I had actually undergone at Goodwill was replacement enumerator training. The Census expected a lot of turnover and I would be called to fill in as needed. Another week passed, and I got a call from Heinrich, who identified himself as my team leader.
During this time my family and I moved to a different neighborhood. (Yes, my own life is disorganized as any random government agency.) Heinrich said I would have to be reassigned to a different district. I told him we were heading out for a road trip and a summer stay in Minnesota—would there be a chance for me to enumerate in Arizona, even for a week? "Well, given the lag time between offices..."
The anticlimax, then, is that I have yet to enumerate on my own. I'd hoped to get in a good month of it in Arizona. I hope to get the chance during my summer stay in Minnesota. My in-laws live in the district of Michelle Bachmann (who they did not vote for). She advised her constituents to "get armed and dangerous," and to not answer the Census. Minnesota may lose a congressional district over that advice. Her district, to be exact.
To be continued, possibly. Meanwhile, I have every confidence that the Census will find a substitute to knock on the doors that might have been assigned to me. The procedures grind away slowly, but grind they do. And plenty of my fellow Arizonans want and need the work.
Cross-posted to Social Capitalism, with some marginally amusing images.