Marilyn and I must be on a list somewhere because we often receive invitations on email to apply for part-time jobs with the government, Federal or State. The latest one was encouraging us to take part in the forthcoming Census. Our inclination is to apply: the money we earn is handy but, more importantly, it keeps us in circulation with other people and helps us feel we are not totally useless. Not knowing what was expected, we both applied and were pleased when we were accepted. Perhaps we should have been suspicious with the quickness of the response but, not having worked in this area before, we were free of any concerns.
We applied for general dogsbody jobs but a friend ticked the box to be a supervisor. He is 80 years old and has been a farmer all his life so couldn’t understand why he was picked. Was there nobody else out there, younger and more experienced in this sort of thing? Apparently not.
Our jobs started a couple of weeks ago and we had been allocated to two different supervisors. Both were bemoaning the fact that the response to the ads had been poor and they were both short of enough workers to cover the amount of work. If we had known what was expected, we might have been inclined for only one of us to apply and the other to act as (unpaid) support.
We were each given an area on the map and our role was to develop a database of every dwelling in that area. We might expect to get around 200 houses each. Both areas were rural but mine was more small-town with houses closer together. Marilyn’s was full-rural: large farms, some with multiple dwellings, muddy tracks with shacks inhabited by hippies and people who had chosen to live ‘off the grid’. We used an app on our phones to record the details of the dwelling, and pin-point it on a map, deliver a census form to each householder and encourage them to fill it out at the appropriate time.
This is fairly high-level data input and outside our experience. To make matters worse, it rained every day we were out. My habit was to go out to my area for two or three hours every morning, then pick up Marilyn and attack her area in the afternoon for 5 or 6 hours. Her area was so widespread (it was 16km from one side to the other) that we might cover 200km in an afternoon. We finished on Thursday but our job will resume after the Census date when we will have to go out to remind anyone who has neglected to fill out his form.
As I said, the money is always handy and we might normally use it for a holiday. But, where can we go?
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