My NFRU Diary - Day 2

Under the depressing fluorescent lights in the basement of the town’s biggest Catholic church, the fun is unending at the Census Bureau’s enumerator (that is, information-harvesting) training down in Cold Spring, heretofore best known, maybe apocryphally, as the home of the Hudson Valley’s only chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Yesterday, I was vividly reminded that there is indeed one in every crowd, said one being an insatiable attention junkie who keeps stopping the proverbial train with gratuitous questions intended only to monopolize the instructor’s attention.

In the early 90s, when I was trained as a court-appointed special advocate (for foster children, you see), it was a little nebbish who kept raising his hand and whining questions until a certain classmate couldn’t bear it any longer, and sharply declared, “Enough already with the questions you don’t really want answers to!” Yes, I was that classmate.

This time, it’s a Ms. Ellen N—, from beautiful Beacon, as I am. She’s maybe 60, with bags under her eyes and the sort of lugubrious bray people from other places associate with the most unbearable sort of New Yorker, and she’s making a great many of us wonder if our manuals-‘n’forms-laden Census Bureau shoulder bags are heavy enough for inflicting fatal head trauma.

At one point this afternoon, as most of us were aching to be dismissed for the day, she read aloud a sentence in one of our manuals and asked our instructor if she didn’t agree it was badly written. Maybe Martin Amis wasn’t available when they hired a freelancer.

Stephanie, the extremely overweight 21-year-old with the gorgeous face who sat beside me yesterday, apparently dropped out last night, and today her place was taken by Eddie, a corpulent Latino very intent on our all knowing that he is no novice, like the rest of us, but a seasoned veteran of the 2000 census. Early on, when I began cursing under my breath at Ellen’s show-stopping questions, he would chuckle sympathetically, and at one point even whispered that there’s one like her in every training session. But then, after lunch, she snickered at one of his boorish quips, and from that moment on he aimed every new one at her. How long the two of them made the afternoon seem!

Meanwhile, I and Carlos, the installer of ceramic floors I’d chatted with during the first break, amused one another from opposite sites of the room by miming various methods by which we longed to hasten Sue into the loving embrace of her Maker. I’d draw my finger across my jugular, and then Carlos would yank an imaginary noose behind his neck. Hours of fun!

You can understand why people would want to throw us enumerators out of their houses. We’re supposed to insist that they identify themselves racially, and we’re not allowed to surmise their sexes; they have to confirm them. Our instructor said that instead of asking, “So are you a male or female,” we might want to go with something more along the lines of, “I’m going to put you down as a female.” A world of difference!

Boy, am I hoping not to have to interview any touchy butch lesbians with chips on their tattooed, sunburned shoulders.