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Making Cens[us] of it all
Mar. 27th, 2010 07:40 pmA government employee is me! My badge, let me show you it. All your personal information are belong to us. Okay, I'm through applying dated internet memes to my current job status.
My current job is as a General Quarters Enumerator. If you live in a house or apartment or an ordinary Housing Unit (HU) like that and had a Census form mailed to you but you didn't return it, then you can look forward to another month of increasingly desperate letters before someone walks around and knocks on your door. In the meantime, the Census will be busy counting General Quarters (GQs) like college dorms, nursing homes, prisons, military barracks, and other things like that. So I'll be working with administrators at each GQ and then come in to either conduct interviews or distribute mini-forms for the residents to fill out privately, and then double check and cross-tabulate everything over eight different federal forms and then collate everything and turn it in to my supervisor. And then assuming everything goes well during the next month, as we run out of GQs in our region, I'll get transferred into new training for the HU Enumeration operation that will last for who knows how long.
Oh, and the other neat part is that early next week before the official Census Day (April 1), I'm going to be running around town with my crewmates doing Service-Based Enumerator (SBE) to count homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and stuff like that. I'm really excited that I just got a call inviting me to join in the Targeted Nonsheltered Outdoors Location Enumeration (TNSOL), which is quintessential doublespeak for counting people sleeping in doorways and under highway overpasses in the middle of the night. Seriously, I'm psyched that the Census Bureau takes their mission of getting an accurate head count of America that seriously, and I am looking forward to participating in and learning from such a rare historical opportunity.
The training itself was fabulous, and I'm just wow. I'm a "shy" person, but I'm really getting a buzz from learning about what is expected of me and believing that I am capable of doing it, and also that my supervisors seem to agree. It's still temporary part-time work, but it's going to be a big step for me personally and professionally in making 2010 the first non-sucky year in quite a while.
My current job is as a General Quarters Enumerator. If you live in a house or apartment or an ordinary Housing Unit (HU) like that and had a Census form mailed to you but you didn't return it, then you can look forward to another month of increasingly desperate letters before someone walks around and knocks on your door. In the meantime, the Census will be busy counting General Quarters (GQs) like college dorms, nursing homes, prisons, military barracks, and other things like that. So I'll be working with administrators at each GQ and then come in to either conduct interviews or distribute mini-forms for the residents to fill out privately, and then double check and cross-tabulate everything over eight different federal forms and then collate everything and turn it in to my supervisor. And then assuming everything goes well during the next month, as we run out of GQs in our region, I'll get transferred into new training for the HU Enumeration operation that will last for who knows how long.
Oh, and the other neat part is that early next week before the official Census Day (April 1), I'm going to be running around town with my crewmates doing Service-Based Enumerator (SBE) to count homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and stuff like that. I'm really excited that I just got a call inviting me to join in the Targeted Nonsheltered Outdoors Location Enumeration (TNSOL), which is quintessential doublespeak for counting people sleeping in doorways and under highway overpasses in the middle of the night. Seriously, I'm psyched that the Census Bureau takes their mission of getting an accurate head count of America that seriously, and I am looking forward to participating in and learning from such a rare historical opportunity.
The training itself was fabulous, and I'm just wow. I'm a "shy" person, but I'm really getting a buzz from learning about what is expected of me and believing that I am capable of doing it, and also that my supervisors seem to agree. It's still temporary part-time work, but it's going to be a big step for me personally and professionally in making 2010 the first non-sucky year in quite a while.
