Did I say ‘Senseless’? Oh, sorry, my mistake … what I meant to say, of course, was the U.S. “Census” … the official way of counting our national populace for reasons of allocating Congressional seats, electoral votes and governmental program funding. This process is now winding rapidly down to a close (thank the Lord). I’m relieved because my husband, Dana, was hired as a Census Supervisor in our area, and it has been a long road in more ways than one. (Inside joke: one of his workers had to take census information from a person whose only address was listed as:”Route 16, New Hampshire”! Lots of luck on that one, seeing as Route 16 runs from the bottom to the top of our state!). What we observed first-hand about this information-gathering process over the last few months has been very illuminating, to say the least. Of course it’s the “Government” who is orchestrating it, so that accounts for a lot of the ‘ridiculosity’ (how’s that for a term?!) of the process, which can basically be summed up in two simple words: ‘Inefficient’ and ‘Inaccurate’. (This is scary stuff, considering that this is the very same government whose main purpose is to protect us from foreign invasions. But in this case, the fact that different branches of the government seldom talk with one another may indeed prove to be a blessing). Anyway, the first full week of training to prepare Dana for his ‘senseless’ responsibilities was taught by a wonderful, perky young woman, and it was too boring for words, though through no fault of her own. It was a government-mandated curriculum, and it had to be followed to the letter. The first THREE HOURS (no joke, sadly) of it were spent just filling in the forms with the Census-taker’s names, addresses, and general contact information for payroll purposes … and it was done by the workers themselves, who presumably knew their own information. As owners of our own business, we are used to getting A LOT done in a relatively short period of time, and this slow start had my husband nearly crazed and bored out of his mind. That same morning he texted me the following message: “OMG … for every hour I sit here, I think I am losing 10 IQ points” … and this from a man who has never text messaged in his life, but figured out how to do it while waiting for everyone else to finish putting their names in the boxes provided on the forms! Ahhh…As a supervisor, Dana is able to stay put here in his office, and the various other census-takers come to him with their information and data. The Lodge has thus become a regional Census headquarters for the duration of the project, and as I was just an onlooker, I got to sit back and enjoy the show! It wasn’t exactly a fun sight to watch, however. Everywhere you looked there was waste … waste of time, of energy, personnel, materials, you name it. The Wall Street Journal recently had an optimistic article about how employment was WAAAY up this quarter. I am convinced it was entirely because of all the census workers spinning their wheels. I can’t even begin to address the inefficiency issue; I will have to save it for the future book-length edition. Suffice it to say that the fiasco was akin to the $10,000 hammers you heard about in the 80’s, where contractors were selling things to the government for outrageous prices. Not that I noticed any dishonesty; people were amazingly accurate with their time sheets. Part of the inefficiencies arose with census workers couriering information physically, on a twice daily basis from one end of the state to another, when one simple email would have sufficed!
Now for some reason, the US Government never asked my opinion on how it should have been done. Too bad for them, because I could have saved everybody a lot of time and money. In my census taking method, everyone would make a Voluntary personal pilgrimage to a local Census office, just like in bible times, but there would be enough incentives attached to make people WANT to do it, and enough penalties incurred if you didn’t. Believe it! … people would be lining up to be counted! Here’s how it would work: You show up with your family members, and swipe your fingerprint on a computerized pad to register. This proves that you are really you, and that you don’t have any more or less children than you say you have. So once you’re ‘entered’ in the system, you fill out the census questionnaire, and for every man, woman and child who registers, you are instantly given $100. (I guarantee you that even if everyone in America got $100 cash, it would save the government tons of money by being cheaper than the census worker’s payroll under the current system. Next point on my personal system is that if you DON’T show up to be counted within a pre-determined period of time, then all benefits are immediately put on hold. This includes ALL welfare benefits and government subsidies; Medicare and Social Security benefits, tax return money, health care benefits, pensions, and paychecks. You either register or you don’t collect until you do (at which point, any money coming to you is retroactive). It’s as simple as that. For any people who are incapacitated for whatever reason, a Census Worker will come to visit you, but you will only receive half the incentive, or $50, to cover the cost of their time and transportation. Voila! It may not be a totally foolproof system, but I guarantee you it would be more accurate and less expensive than the way we do it now.
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