re: #223 Surabaya Stew

I should have known that trouble was brewing when a phone call from the Census folks came in 4 weeks ago on a Sunday at 10:30am! Apparently they were so short staffed in administration, that even when I rejected the first job posting (I was to be a Senior Citizen assistant in helping our nursing bound elders fill out forms for $14.50/h), they informed me that they would call again the following day with another, higher paying, job. So the following Sunday at 9:15am they call again offering $18.75 to do “non-traditional” enumeration. I accepted in my half-asleep state, not knowing what I was about to get into…

…which was counting homeless people in New York City! (The training manual which the Census forgot to take back from me, advises to “Wear comfortable shoes, should the need to run [from angry and violent homeless people] arise.”) And that was before the disaster that was “training” began…

Instead of the customary 4 days of training (all on the government’s dime) when one learns to be a “traditional” enumerator, only 2 days are doled out for the tougher job of counting our least fortunate citizens. This is even more chanlenging when your trainer has had only 2 days of management training herself! She was competent overall, but clearly overwhelmed by the conflicting and incomplete instructions that she had been given. The first day of training included 2 hours waiting for further instructions from her superiors, and 4 hours of paperwork to fill out in between the remaining 2 hours of instructions. Which left no time for the finger printing, that was required to be completed that day! So, after a promised “5-minute walk” to the main office (that was actually 20 minutes away), us aspiring body-counters had to wait for up to 3 hours to be fingerprinted 2 times each time by a different federal employee! 30 people (mostly mothers with children at day-care) were kicked out at that point (without pay) because they couldn’t wait around any longer after being promised they could go home by 5pm. The next day, training was cut short because the feds, in their great wisdom, had rented classroom space from a Jewish institute of learning, and of course they close up shop early on Shabbos! Duh….

Did I mention that everybody in my class felt totally unprepared to do the work? Or that rain was expected for the full 3 days of the “non-traditional” enumeration? Because that’s when the real fun began….