Count Me In

The Census Bureau Needs You the sign called out to me. Or at least I think it did. After all, how else was I swayed to make the call? It might have been the employment doldrums I had been in for two years as I clawed my way through a divorce and its river of crap and sadness.

No, the Census Bureau needed me.

After all, who better to count people who hadn’t sent in their census form than the woman who remembers her undocumented parents debating seriously whether to send in their 1980 form, lest it bring immigration agents in its wake? With my bilingual skills and my unintimidating looks, I could bring the fearful and uncounted into the constitutionally mandated fold.

By the time I’d dialed the Census Bureau phone number, I’d worked myself up into a lather of importance and adventure. It would even be a good step in my writing career—didn’t Hawthorne work in the Customs Office? Or was it Melville? No matter, clearly the path to my literary immortality ran through government work. Plus the job paid $18 an hour.

I learned there was a test to take before I’d be allowed into the ranks, and even then nothing was guaranteed. Apparently in this age of 10 percent unemployment, even Census jobs were coveted.

I tried not to sweat the test. But once I got it in front of me, a few beads of sweat popped up on my upper lip. I want to say the Census test was mindless, but it wasn’t. My estimation of government types increased slightly as I noticed the questions actually required thought.

It was one of the final moments my opinion would be so high.

Several weeks later, I got the call.

Could I come in for training—paid training—for a week? I wasn’t sure what I needed to learn that would take a full week, but I was game.

Of course I had forgotten that the “Bureau” in “Census Bureau” is the root word of “bureaucracy.” I was smacked with this reality when, during the first day of training, we spent an entire morning filling out forms.

Filling out forms perfectly. And being scolded for moving ahead of the instructor by, say, writing our last names after our first without permission. And, oh, the instructor! Although eventually I would develop a certain fondness for my harried “Crew Leader,” it would not be on that day. He was easily exasperated by questions and exhibited a fondness for explaining the process of sharpening number two pencils to an extent that made me want to throttle him.

As I filled out the forms I learned that I would be an Enumerator. As an Enumerator, I would be going from home to home in my neighborhood filling out “EQ”s—Enumerator Questionnaires. If I ran into a “dangerous situation,” I was to fill out an InfoComm form. Every day I should fill out information in my “AA,” a binder with a list of all addresses in my designated neighborhood, with blanks left for the households that hadn’t sent back their form. To get paid I had to fill out a “308.” Every day. We went over each of these forms in agonizing detail.

Day two of training was slightly less excruciating, but only just. Our CL read a mind-numbing script in a slightly apologetic tone and was totally thrown by any questions not in his book. “Um, can you save that question for later?” he asked about 1,257 times.

Finally, on the fourth day of training, we were told it was time to go out in the field. At last!

Except, it turned out that even with my shaky understanding of the difference between an EQ and a cheeseburger, I was being sent out alone.

Mercifully, the first five apartments I hit were all empty. I dutifully filled out an NV form—a “Notice of Visit,” a little slip trying to sound both official and friendly at the same time, asking the recipient to give me a call on my cell phone—and followed the rigorous protocol of not affixing it to anything that could possibly hold it in place, as had been explained in hours six through eight of our training.

I walked around on the sunny afternoon, enjoying the scattering of NVs like so many apple seeds. About 15 minutes before the time I was to call it quits, I rang a bell and, much to my chagrin, someone actually opened the door.

“Hello, I’m Maria from the U.S. Census Bureau.” I read my script and hoped I didn’t sound too robotic. “This form should only take about 10 minutes to fill out. Can you tell me how many people were living here on April 1?” “Eight,” said the beautiful woman with the almost impossible to understand accent.

This form was definitely not going to take just 10 minutes to fill out.

I sat in her sparsely-furnished living room and dutifully wrote down the names of the eight occupants, spilling over to a EQ Extension form and asking her to repeat herself when she said her letters in an unusual way, like “Zed” for “Z.”

Finally, after asking the questions about race, babies we might have forgotten and whether she owned or rented, we were done.

“Thank you for taking the time to give me this information,” I said to her. I knew, because she had mentioned it, that she had given me the time even though her children were about to get out of school. “Thank you for counting us,” she said.