{"id":1471,"date":"2010-12-15T09:44:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T16:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/?p=1471"},"modified":"2012-09-27T09:45:38","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T16:45:38","slug":"memoirs-of-a-2010-census-worker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/?p=1471","title":{"rendered":"Memoirs of a 2010 census worker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Note: this is my contribution to our family holiday newsletter for 2010.\u00a0 It is all true and not embellished at all.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

If there is any better proof that I chose one of the least financially gainful and secure career cards in The Game of Life, it\u2019s the fact that I had to take a job with the 2010 U.S. Census in order to pay my bills this year.\u00a0 Sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents per hour was my main motivation for doing a three month stint with the government, but in the end I managed to get a whole lot more: a collection of crazy stories that illustrate the current collective psyche of our nation.<\/p>\n

The forty-hour training week quickly morphed into a group therapy session for failed entrepreneurs.\u00a0 My fellow enumerators told a variety of life stories with one common theme: \u201cBusiness totally sucks these days\u201d.\u00a0 But our supervisors livened things up with their passion for government service (really!) and their passion for the opposite sex.\u00a0 I\u2019m not making this up.\u00a0 Picture a stocky southern woman with bright red hair constantly getting sidetracked and telling us the most bizarre stories of her life.\u00a0\u00a0 We learned the sad origin of her teenage grandson\u2019s tattoo, the miracle diet and exercise regimen that allowed her to loose over two hundred pounds in less than a year and, over and over, how much she loves to look at hunky guys.\u00a0 If I had gotten it all on tape, it would have made a valid sexual harassment lawsuit.\u00a0 One of the many jaw-droppers of the week was coming back from lunch to find her giving one of the men in our group a back rub.\u00a0 It\u2019s your tax dollars at work, folks!<\/p>\n

While the job of collecting census data is pretty low-key and easy by many standards, there is one significant downside: tea-party zealots.\u00a0 Apparently we have a lot of them here in Colorado and oddly they all have the same script down for making the census workers\u2019 task more difficult.\u00a0 It\u2019s a weird mix of extreme hostility towards the government and simplistic romanticism about the U.S. Constitution and the founding fathers.\u00a0 Every time I tried to explain to these stubborn fanatics that what I was doing is in the constitution and has been going on since 1790, they simply regurgitated a bunch of random Glenn Beck rhetoric.\u00a0 It turns out Mr. Beck did a long anti-census rant on air last spring and it became these morons\u2019 mantra on how to deal with people like me.\u00a0 One woman actually said the words, \u201ctake away our oppressive government and let the magic of capitalism save this great nation of ours\u201d.\u00a0 The winner of anti-government freak award was a really tough biker dude who immediately yelled at me when I pulled my car into his driveway.\u00a0 His house looked like a fortress with animal skulls everywhere, and I later learned from his neighbors that he routinely shoots out the streetlights at the fire station across the street from his home.<\/p>\n

So if you are looking for cheap thrills in the year 2020, I highly recommend taking a job with the U.S. Census.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: this is my contribution to our family holiday newsletter for 2010.\u00a0 It is all true and not embellished at all. If there is any better proof that I chose one of the least financially gainful and secure career cards … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[125,114],"tags":[328],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-humor","tag-memoirs-of-a-2010-census-worker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1471"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1476,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions\/1476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wallypots.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}