Return From The Darkside

Author Tex Norton

Yeah, I admit it. I made a mistake. I don’t even have an excuse. I thought I could work within the System and perhaps even make a difference. What a mistake!

It all started last Fall on a crisp soon-to-be-Winter day. Neighbors had seen a notice that the Census would be visiting our small, country town in the Hill Country of central Texas. They teased me to go with them to see what this might be all about. I had nothing else planned. In a moment of weakness, I went.

My neighbors were really looking for a job. Their livelihood tends to be seasonal so they take-on side-jobs when available. To them, this seemed like the ideal part-time, keep-out-of-mischief solution. For me, I can’t say I had any specific expectations. All I now recall is just being curious.

As luck would have it, I aced the test while my neighbors did rather poorly. They really wanted a job and all I wanted was to continue enjoying retirement. Shortly afterwards, there was a phone message asking me to return a call from the Local Census Office (LCO). By the time I returned the call, the position had been filled. Relieved is my recollection of how I felt at the time. Yet another phone message repeated this same process. That must be it. No more phone calls. I was off the hook.

Then came Spring this year and the phone rang once again. This time, I was home and made the mistake of personally answering it. “Would I be available to supervise a group of approximately 20 Enumerators?” a male voice asked. Caught totally unprepared, I said “yes.” That was all it took to lock me into “the System.”

And what a system it is! Well, at least in my mind, I considered it the Dark Side by comparison with how I’d spent my working life. Except for the first ten or so years when I worked for real companies, I’d spent my entire life being self-employed. Now, not only did I have a boss, I had several bosses and they all represented bureaucracy! Government Bureaucracy, no less.

As my faulty reasoning evaluated the situation, I concluded that they were going to pay someone to do the job anyway; why not me? I knew I’d do a good, accurate and competent job so that the census results would be correct in my area. I could only hope that there were others like me throughout the country with the same goals. Besides, it would only be a temporary job for a couple of months. Big evaluation mistake. I’d failed to take the “bureaucratic mind” into consideration in my evaluation. Little did I know at that time that it is impossible to do a good job in a bureaucratic system no matter how well-intentioned the person.

How bad could it be? After all, the only purpose of a census is to count noses. You count and you’re done, right? Not in the bureaucracy.

After attending a week-long supervisor’s training, I was then required to teach a week-long training session to my group of enumerators. The stated objective was that every person in the entire country would be taught exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Supposedly identical classes were conducted throughout the entire USA. As a result, I was required to read verbatim the entire course from the approved training manual. Aside from being boring, no decent teacher would ever consider that approach as being a form of teaching. But that’s not even the critical factor.

If your objective is to teach everyone the exact same thing (whether at the same time or not), you use today’s technology and simply make a video of the presentation. Never occurred to the census folk.

One major point we were required to emphasize is personal privacy. Supposedly no one would have any personal information revealed to anyone else not in the need-to-know loop. The census folk call this PII: Personally Identifiable Information. It was stressed over-and-over that no one was permitted to reveal any information about another person. So the first encounter I had with a census person from another county was that person’s complete lack of understanding of the term “PII.”

Statistically, 75% of the population of our county had already mailed-in the census form in a timely manner. Our job was to contact the remaining 25% to obtain their input. That’s when we found out that most of these folks never received the mailed questionnaires because the Post Office (yes, that Post Office) refused to deliver same. Refused? Yep. We live in a rural area containing large ranches. Many of the roads are officially known as County Roads, Ranch Roads and Farm-to-Market (FM) roads. The Census Bureau elected to identify all of our roads as being County Roads. Since the computer system that printed the address labels was prepared by the lowest bidder, the computer program itself abbreviated County Road. Not as Co Rd or CO RD but as “CORD.” Naturally the Post Office refused since they had no road within our county by the name of Cord Road.

Many of the locals receive all of their mail at a Post Office Box in town. For whatever reason, the Post Office also refused to deliver Census Questionnaires to Post Office Boxes. So one arm of government made still more work for another arm of that same government. Fiefdoms, anyone? But we promise we’ll do a better job with Nationalized Health Care.

You may be surprised to learn that some folk out there aren’t particularly happy with our current government. Yes, I realize that’s a surprise, but it’s true. As a result, we had some interesting encounters. The usual dog bites were common. A few women-in-particular showed-off their extensive vocabulary thus putting some seasoned Sailors to shame. Amazing how many Meth labs are scattered throughout the hinter lands (must be today’s equivalent of stills). And while you thought the movie, Deliverance, was fiction, I’m here to tell you that they exist. The most obscene event occurred in an adjacent county when a woman attorney took six pot-shots with a pistol at a census worker; missed every shot; went back into her house and came running-out after the woman census worker with a knife and then stabbed her. An attorney did this! What’s a mother to do?

We encountered all of these interesting situations via an Assignment Area Binder containing the addresses within a given area known as a “Block.” How blocks were determined is still a mystery to me. I had over 100 Blocks that consisted entirely of water. Yes. No land; just water. And no, we don’t have houseboats in our Highland Lakes area. But I digress.

A Block or Blocks are contained in an AA Binder. The Enumerator has a list of all “known” addresses in that Block. If the resident had already responded to the Census Questionnaire, there were a series of “XXXXXs” in the “Status” column of that AA Binder. All the Enumerator had to do was track-down the remaining locations not containing the XXXXXs. For reasons still unknown to me (and I use the term “reasons” loosely), the bureaucrat-in-charge of my LCO (Local Census Office) decided to duplicate single Blocks into more than one Assignment Binder. Now I’d noted that most Binders contained 30 to 40 addresses that still needed to be enumerated. I typically assigned a Binder to an Enumerator and that person was then responsible for all the missing locations within that Binder. However, the Bureaucrat-in-Charge managed to totally mess-up the system by including the same identical Block into more than one Binder.

Recall that XXXXs mean the information is already on-record while the blank Status box meant that location still needed to be investigated. With the Blocks duplicated into more that one AA Binder, I now had more than one Enumerator canvassing a given area. Furthermore, in one AA Binder, a given address might be blank while that same address in another AA Binder contained XXXXs. Since census data were constantly being received and the resultant status updated, I concluded that the more-recent version must be the Binder showing the XXXXs. After reviewing with my immediate supervisor, we started to submit correction forms, as applicable. That’s when we found out that the duplication was intentional. No reason given; just intentional. Don’t you just love bureaucracy?

The good news is that the supervisor was fired as was his supervisor. Unfortunately, that was not until after many other devastating situations occurred.

You may recall the uproar that began last year regarding the “black boxes” carried by every Enumerator. Among other things, those black boxes recorded the GPS coordinates of every front door in America. Ask any returning military what GPS coordinates are used for if this doesn’t concern you. I’ve not been able to determine the cost of those black boxes, but I’m here to tell you that they were so defective that they were ultimately scrapped. So here we are in the incredible computer-age doing the entire Census with paper and pencils.

The last number I saw was over $14 Billion that had been spent on this 2010 Census. And it’s not finished. My involvement is finished but there are folks out there right now doing “follow-up” work. “What follow-up?” you ask. Starting last year, census personnel were out “locating” potential addresses to ultimately be investigated. Some of those structures were burned down before April 1st of 2010 while some were barns or sheds. When we encountered locations that did not contain a habitable residential structure as of April 1st, we noted it as a “delete” on the AA-list. We also noted that many locations were second homes while the owners’ usual homes were elsewhere. The current make-work is to now double check these locations to make absolutely sure that they really are to be deleted entirely or to be listed as unoccupied as of April 1st. Who knows what follow-up to this follow-up will be tried next? Hey, we’ve got until December 31st to keep spending taxpayer money.

I just wanted you to know your tax dollars were being spent wisely. No need to thank me. I consider this a public service.

As the old saying goes, If I’d just known then what I know now… This experience has certainly taught me a valuable lesson. My mistake was thinking I could do a good job in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, I gave “credence” to a corrupt system thus giving it some semblance of legitimacy. There comes a time when the only correct answer is “No.”

Related posts:

1. It’s Always RE-active; Never PRO-active
2. In Defense Of The Post Office
3. Town Hall Meeting

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 1:08 am and is filed under Authors, Economics, Opinion, Politics, Tex Norton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.