Response to Cencus?

Hi -- I really hate to get into this one, but I was one of the enumerators who got hired to pass out census forms this year. Actually, I enjoyed the job, even slogging through a foot of snow to reach summer houses where no one would be until Labor Day! Yeah, it seemed pretty foolish, but as long as they were paying me to be outdoors getting some exercise . . . Towards the end, when it looked like we wouldn't get everything out by the deadline, they told us we could stop delivering forms to houses that obviously hadn't been plowed out all winter -- why couldn't they have thought of that sooner?!? I saw in a newspaper article that this census was estimated to cost about six billion dollars (yes, you read that right). I about croaked when I saw that. I know it's required by the constitution to have a census, but I can think of a lot better ways to spend that much money -- we're taxpayers, too. I would add, if a census worker comes to your door, please don't be rude to them. We got a weeks training (mostly to make sure we could read their maps, and fix them when they were wrong, which they frequently were), we were told 1.that if we gave out ANY information to ANYONE, we would be facing a huge fine and possible jail time and 2.not to push anyone for information they didn't want to give -- which was fine with me, as I certainly wasn't going to, anyway. We were working in our own home areas or nearby -- do you really think we wanted to antagonize friends and neighbors? Anyway, to go on, I actually never saw either of the forms other than in their envelopes, though they passed a copy of each around during the training. It was a big class and no one really got time to look in very deeply -- I wonder if they did that on purpose? Some areas the long form went to every other house, some areas it went to every sixth. Don't know why. Even the peole who trained us were local, temporary employees -- they didn't know any more about most things than we did. I agree that the long form sounds like it was too intrusive, though I don't think that there was any real evil intent in it. It's just that the information might not always be in the hands of the people who it was intended for. But those of you who commented on how little privacy we already have were right. It's already gone.

[ Previous | Next ]