Canvassing...

[The following blog was written on the morning of November 7, 2006.]

I will get fired in fifteen and a half hours. My last shift will end at 7 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, just as the voting locations will close in the state of Nevada.
I am a canvasser. The job description is brutally simple: you knock on certain doors, ask people who they're going to vote for (and how likely they are to do so), thank them and leave. There are many positive side effects, such as getting to know Reno and the areas around it, getting free food at the Party's headquarters, making friends with like-minded people (so that the nightmare scenario of hooking up with a beautiful girl who happens to hate everything you stand for is out by default), getting to know the addresses (and ages!) of your college professors and getting a free workout for the lower half of your body. The downside? Your feet. Not used to doing so much work, they develop blisters and all kinds of injuries as you walk for miles every single day. The blisters appear out of nowhere, grow and pop unbelievably fast – sometimes the entire process takes place during a single shift.
Walking hurts. The feet never have enough time to fully recover and old injuries end up being as painful as (if not more than) the new ones. Sometimes every step is accompanied by excruciating agony. Add a little makeup and you'll have yourself a bona fide zombie, a being with only one goal in mind. Unlike our undead brethren, however, we seek only to ask people who they'll vote for. Not chat about weather and not convince them to vote for somebody in particular – just hit and run, because time is precious and the norm is supposed to be 25 houses per hour.
We are the pawns of the political process: so little, insignificant and expendable, and yet so vital to the giant political machine that gets most of its information from us, college-aged kids walking around with old model Palm Pilots and bags full of shiny brochures filled with negative campaigning and promises that are too idealistic to ever come true. We are expendable and we know it. It seems that so do the people we get to canvass: they can get away with anything short of actually attacking us. Each and every one of us – both the "old guard" that have been canvassing since August and the army of newbies that got hired in the last few weeks – has interesting stories about the people we canvassed. There was a crazy old man in tiny Speedos; an elderly woman who hasn't left her house in three years; a man who opened the door only to tell us that he was in the middle of having sex and would very much appreciate if we stopped by sometime later; and lots of rednecks with giant hyper-aggressive dogs. My personal worst experience was when I canvassed a woman who was dying of cancer. She was about 40 years old and looked pretty well, except for the fact that she was in her pajamas at 4 p.m. It turned out that she had just a couple of months left to live, could hardly move, and I woke her up when I rang the bell. The fact that she yelled at me at the top of her lungs and caused some of her neighbors to get out and see what was going on didn't help much, either.
It's quite easy to lose your faith in humanity with a job like this. I can't find the words to describe how sad it is to see an old person, who is supposed to be wise and zen, shut the door in your face while screaming that they lost all faith in the political process and will never vote again. Same goes for little children who copy their parents in pretty much everything and shut the door while saying "sovvy, we ave not interefted." And they wonder why folks don't vote…
Today is the last day to vote. Last day of work. The most intense day of all. My "shift," if you would like to call it that, will go from 4 a.m. till 7 p.m. – for 15 hours. All kinds of food and most of local candidates will be there to keep our stomachs full and our moral high. Afterwards, there will be a party that will go for as long as it would take to count up all the ballots and get a good idea of who won what (and why). And then… Then everything will be over. We will part ways and try to concentrate on school – or find new jobs. Nevada will host the second presidential caucus in 2008, and the preparations will begin as early as January 2007, so I know where I'll go if I need a fun job. …I still can't come to terms with the idea that in less than 24 hours this will all be over. Thousands of elections all over the United States will come to an end, and I – I will get over 30 hours a week to fill with things to do. At last, I'll be able to catch up with all the homework, see the movies everybody has been talking about for weeks and get some semblance of a life.
But that will all be later, and now it's time to go and work my last shift – the longest and most important one of them all. I take one more look at my things: a fully charged cell phone, two Red Bulls (I'll need all the energy I can get), my hiking boots (which have hundreds of miles on them and still look great) and gloves. I double-check everything, kill the lights and step out into the dark. It's 3:30 a.m. Time to go to work.