My NRFU Diary - Day 4

I’ve been going on and on about Ellen, the needy old crone at my Census 2010 training who keeps disrupting the proceedings with questions designed only to get her engaged in a dialogue with the instructor. I think I can very accurately paraphrase one such exchange.

Instructor: I’ll be meeting in [named locale] with whoever wants to meet with me to go over your 660.1s on Monday between 4 and 6:30.
Ellen: To clarify — and I just want to be very clear about this — between 4 and 6:30 you’ll be meeting with whoever…shouldn’t be whomever? Strike that. That’s probably neither here nor there. To clarify, you’ll be meeting with whomever or whoever, whichever is correct, between 4 and 6:30. And what day again?
Instructor: Monday.
Ellen: Not Tuesday then, if I understand correctly, and by that token, certainly not Wednesday either.
Instructor: No, Monday.
Ellen: Thanks. Just wanted to avoid any misunderstanding. And that’s if we have a question about our….what again?
Instructor: Your 660.1s. The form you fill out if a hostile nonrespondent curses at you in a language you don’t understand.
Ellen: Like Farsi, for instance. I don’t speak a word of Farsi. Does anybody else?

The rest of the class either ignores her or stares daggers at her windpipe.

Ellen: So I’m assuming Farsi would qualify?
Instructor: Yes. Any language you don’t understand.
Ellen: And that includes languages we’ve heard, and can probably identify, but don’t actually speak, like French or German, assuming they’re not being spoken in a strange accent, or some strange dialect that might make them unidentifiable.
Instructor: Any language you don’t understand.
Ellen: Just for my reference, how are we defining “understand”?
Instructor: Use your best judgment.
Ellen: What if we can’t tell if it’s Spanish or Portuguese? A neighbor from down the street went to Brazil back in the 90s, and said the two sound very similar.
Instructor: Any language you don’t understand.
Ellen: Or was it Argentina? No, it couldn’t have been Argentina because they definitely do speak Spanish there, unless I’m badly mistaken. I haven’t been there myself, but I saw a TV movie in the 70s, I guess it was, about Eva Peron.
Instructor: Any language you don’t understand.
Ellen: So as a rule of thumb, if we’re cursed in a language we don’t understand — any language at all — even if we can’t positively identify it, then we fill out a 660.1
Instructor: Exactly. A 660.1.
Ellen: And then we give that to you in [named locale] on Monday, between 4 and 6:30?
Instructor: That’s right. Yes.
Ellen: OK. I just wanted to be sure. And we use the No. 2 pencil to fill in the form, or a ballpoint pen?
Instructor: Pen.
Ellen: Duly noted. Is black ink OK — I mean, imagine we’re at our desk at home, and without thinking use a pen we might use for everyday correspondence, instead of one of those provided — or does it have to be blue?
Instructor: Use your best judgment. Just press hard enough for the second copy to be legible.
Ellen: Just to double-check: by legible you mean readable, right?
Instructor: Right. Readable.
Ellen: In how brightly lighted a room? One that’s lighted by just a couple of candles, for instance, or by bright sunlight?

At that point, the student I’ve described earlier as Daddy’s Perfect Girl interjects in her ultra-demure, nearly inaudible murmur.

DPG: Actually, on page 6-22, paragraph 3, of the salmon-colored field manual, it specifies only that it be in pen. It makes no specific mention of color.

After three and a half days of that, we finally got to go out into The Field this afternoon, and to conduct interviews with real Americans, and what a very dispiriting experience! My first interview was with a 24-year-old mother of two kids with different surnames and a look of utter helplessness. Then there was a grandmother and her very polite, morbidly obese granddaughter, the latter with one of those unique black girls’ names full of k’s and q’s. It was breathtaking outside, and here was this 15-year-old girl glued with a glazed expression to the TV at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Finally, there was a gracious woman from one of the less glamorous South American countries, one of the –guays, who seemed genuinely mortified that “we” hadn’t received her completed questionnaire, and whose strangely spotty 31-year-old son sat over the course of our interview unashamedly picking his nose up to the first knuckle.