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.