After nearly two months of unemployment, days upon days of not getting in the shower as early as I had planned, I am mostly working again. Not that I’ve done any actual work yet. I’m employed by the 2010 census, a job that should last about two months. Friday was my first day of training. Really all I was trained in was how many hours to work and how to get paid. The latter is obviously particularly interesting to me. The day was surreal and felt a bit like the first day of school if I had gone to school with a pool of the desperate for work of all ages. I spent a lot of time desperately trying to make mental notes because I’d planned to keep track of this whole experience. I figure working for the census has to good for at least a couple of anecdotes of the “Yep, humans sure are weird little beasts” type. The real training sessions begin tonight and I’m definitely bringing a journal to make notes in seeing as the mental notes were really stacking up last time.

Luckily for me the training was being held at the big Catholic church down the street from my house. It was a beautiful morning and the walk to the church took less than ten minutes. There was no clear indication anywhere that I could see of where the training was being held. An older woman with large swatches of pink in her hair was asking a man who seemed to be the groundskeeper about the census so I followed her past the Catholic school behind the church into some kind of gymnasium/auditorium kind of building. The school kids were all outside listening to what I can only assume were morning announcements over a loudspeaker. We found the room where the training was being held, got our packets of forms (so many forms), and took a seat. There were probably about fifty people there, maybe more. Most people seemed older than me. There were maybe two other girls about my age and maybe five younger guys. I imagine that in these troubled economic times I’ll be working with a pretty good cross-section of society on a job like this.

We spent most of the morning being told how to fill out our stack of forms. The weirdest moment was when we had to all stand, raise our right hands and take an oath to uphold the constitution and a bunch of other government-y things. How appropriate that we were in a Catholic church building repeating an oath in unison. Someone outside would probably have no idea if we were swearing allegiance to the federal government or reciting the Apostles Creed.

During a fifteen minute break an older gentleman with a white mustache struck up a conversation with me. Topics covered included the fact that I am neither in high school nor college any longer, how I moved here from Boston, time he spent in Boston, that one time he almost lost his dog who had no collar only a bandana in Cambridge, how humid Boston is in the summer much like Vietnam, how he cannot watch movies about Vietnam because it is too painful but Platoon is a good movie, how he thought the southern guys he was with in Vietnam were “retarded” and he had to ask them to turn off that dang country music, and my experience living in Japan. I felt like I had a surprisingly complete picture of who he is after fifteen minutes of talking. Finding the people in a particular geographic location to be mentally retarded aside, he seemed like alright dude.

Another person who seemed eager to buddy up with me was a middle-aged lady who is totally named after an elven princess from Lord of the Rings. Yikes. I tried to respectfully maintain distance from her because she kept making fun of people who were confused about the instructions, seemed generally awful and was just never shutting up. She did however say that she was going to “go suss it out” at one point which made me giggle because my nerd brain had already internally made “cen-suss it out” jokes.

At some point in the proceedings we were informed that, whoops, actually we can’t stay in this church anymore and have to move our training to a different church on the other side of town. This super sucked for me because, assuming that all I would have to do would be to walk down the street today Mr. Boyfriend had the car. So I had to approach the dudes and ladies of training and ask for a ride. I felt like the least together person because I had also been the only jackass who hadn’t thought to bring their own pen and had to borrow one from a man wearing a suit with a vest. The main training guy agreed to give me a ride and I somewhat dolefully ate the meager sandwich I had prepared under a tree outside while they packed up the training materials.

The guy giving me a ride turned out to not be from the area and didn’t actually know how to get to church number two. Yikes. To my relief he was easy to talk to and even turned out to be from New York City. After that he kept saying “us east coasters.” Ah, the unifying power of having lived in sort of the same area. I found out that he moved around a lot because he was in the air force. You find out a ton about strangers when you are forced into contact with them for several hours.

Church number two was in a part of town I’d never really been to before. There were a lot of newish prefab condos and sterile buildings like that. By the church was this massive lawn that seemed to be used for absolutely nothing. We were early so I stretched out on it to read. The grass was way too green, the flowers too yellow or orange. It was too quiet and too still. I had the feeling of being transported to a fake universe created strictly for the purpose of weirding me out.

All that remained to be done here was take our finger prints but this took forever. I didn’t rush to get in line though because I didn’t have shit to do that day so why not get paid for more hours. I sat around crocheting and reading and trying not to make too much eye contact with elf lady. I was there long enough for Mr. Boyfriend to get out of work and come pick me up. Unfortunately he had to wait because apparently I am just the worst at giving my fingerprints. It took maybe an hour just for them to be satisfied with my fingerprint quality. We had to get two sets of all our fingerprints, each set taken by a different person. The first lady was sort of mean and kept accusing me of willfully fucking up my fingerprints. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with all the ones they rejected. They looked exactly like fingerprints to me. The second lady was a lot nicer and more patient but still perpetually dissatisfied with my prints. Finally I was done, but I was so frazzled that I filled out my time sheet wrong and had to do that again too. With that handed in I finally got to the part of my day where I didn’t have to be in a church.

So working for the census is already decidedly weird. We’ll see how tonight’s training holds up in comparison. It’s not even in a church.