After two solid days of working as a federal employee, I already have multiple observations on the system that is being run. Let me just describe what I have learned so far and then I'll go into how the rest of the trainees are progressing.
We clock in using a D-308 time sheet. It's a carbon copy type of time-sheet with us, the employees, keeping the bottom carbon copy at the end of the day with our Crew Leader taking the original copy to the LCO (local office) at either the end of the day or early sometime the next day. My job as a NRFU Enumerator is to use the given Assignment Area Binder (AA) to go into the field and visit each Housing Unit (HU), usually by following the Address List with the given Map Spot No. and corresponding House No. found in columns six and seven of the Address List in the AA. With each HU, a follow up Enumberator Questionnaire must be filled out starting with contacting the resident of the house which will either be the Respondent or, as in most cases, it will be the Reference Person. In some cases a proxy may be used in order to obtain information to fill out the Enumerator Questionnaire, also known as form D-1E. If someone is contacted, question S1 should be asked, and if answered Yes, the appropriate box should be marked with an X with the enumerator moving on the question S2. This is where it gets tricky. If the respondent or reference person answers yes to question S2, the enumerator should move on to S3, however, if the respondent or reference person answers no, the enumerator should skip to question S4.................. Gwaaaddddd.
In any case, after the interview, the record of contact section on the front page needs to be appropriately filled out with the time, date and outcome of the interview. These are two letter corresponding codes with either, NV = left notice of visit, NC = no contact, RE = refusal, CI = conducted interview and finally OT = other. This process continues for a few more pages.
Here's how the class is progressing...
Dennis can't differentiate between which questions to skip and not skip so he just asks them all. Maybe he just likes to read.
Dudley, as far as I can tell, is one hundred and four years old today!!! Janice brought us brownies. (No joke. Some lady brought brownies today.) He has two hearing aides and can't hear numbers very well. Needless to say there are a lot of repeats during class. Happy suck it, fuck you Dudley!
Mark, god bless him, is as dumb as a brick. For the most part, he struggles with the question skipping, but also has trouble remembering to flip back to the front page at the end of the interview to fill out the record of contact and THEN flip back to the last page in order to sign his name and date the D-1E paper work.
Jennifer has done this before so she just texts the whole time and keeps getting called on but not knowing where we are so she has to catch up. By the Way Jen, sweatpants do not count as business casual clothing, just a heads up for your next job.
Steve can't remember to mark down in the Address list the status codes and date, found in columns two and three. Mostly he can't remember the three letters we use and what they mean. Here they are - O = occupant, V = vacant and finally the hardest D = deleting.
Janice... well Janice brought the brownies so she's cool. She also spent half of the day yesterday doing a piece of needle point as a present for her brother's birthday that's coming up. Just what a grown man needs, a piece of needle point art to hang in his house. Oh and Janice, you fucked up on charlie browns shirt, he's supposed to be wearing yellow and Lucy's shirt is blue. You have them backwards. Boy, is your brother gonna be pissed.
Vierva is some sort of Scandinavian woman and is mainly concerned with how to label the ethnicity of people without offending them. Here's a rule of thumb: a mexican is mexican. Boom.
Marion and Hedi both have trouble distinguishing between a reference person and a respondent. Ladies, the difference is that one owns the house and one is just someone that lives in the house, not the owner, but still lives in the house. Jeeesh...
Finally we come to Wendy who, like Jennifer, has done this before and her main advice for new comers was to put a piece of tape on the top of our name tags so they don't get ripped off or maybe just put them in a plastic bag so they don't get ruined.
Meanwhile, I have been dead for about five and a half hours now because I've jammed all the un-sharpened pencils, found in kit G-6, into my eye sockets. Right around the shit storm of a conversation brought up between Wendy and Mark about "how to label a trans-gender person because there are only spots to put an x for Male and Female" followed by Dudley's comment on how "you don't know what you're gonna find these days," I lost my mind and began pulling my hair out and screaming. Then, when Orion, the Assistant Crew Leader, asked the question about the morality of defining a person as Mexican or some part of Ancient Aztec Indian Tribe, I worked the first pencil deep into my left eye socket and finished it off by slamming my face into the piano that sits behind me. The final straw came when Steve asked what we do if someone answers the door and then "punches us on the face." I finished off the pencils and then pulled the tiny pencil sharpener out of Kit G-6 and removed the razor from it. I slowly slit my neck for the remaining two hours and then clocked myself out at 4:30 using the D-308 paperwork. They just left me there and said "see you tomorrow!" But I guess that's just one of the perks when working for the government.
