The Assistant

I'm sure you remember that for the past month I have been working for the U.S Census, doing Group Quarters operation.The operation should have started in April (and been finished by June), but when COVID shut everything down the dates changed to the beginning of July through the beginning of September.

This week the team I'm assigned to has been one of several working on the on and off-campus housing for one of the city's major universities. Many of the units are currently unoccupied, but we still have to make multiple tries to talk to everyone in the building and find out if they were living there on April 1, 2020. The Census Bureau takes its mission of counting everyone in the country seriously!

Yesterday night my boss (Census Field Supervisor, or CFS in Census-speak) told me she had a problem. The Bureau has a firm no-overtime policy. With three days left in the week she was getting very close to the maximum 40 hour limit and needed me to help her out today. At the end of July, when I went to the Census office to complete my onboarding process I learned that I had been assigned as a CFS Assistant. The title carried no increase in pay, but allowed me to help out with paperwork and answer questions from other enumerators. Up to now the title hadn't meant anything, but that was about to change

This morning, after our daily team phone call, I met the CFS at a parking lot a couple of miles from my house. She gave me boxes that contained the work that had been assigned, and told me which sets belonged to which Enumerator. Then she headed back home to do paperwork, while I headed towards our team meeting place, another parking lot behind a restaurant 20 minutes away. I distributed the paperwork and set up an afternoon meeting to collect anything that had been completed.

Once everyone was gone I figured I'd have a lot of free time. That turned out not to be the case. I received a fairly steady stream of texts and phone calls from both the CFS and the people in the field. In between I organized the Census paperwork I have been carrying around in the trunk of my car, setting aside the surplus to go back to the main Census office. As each Enumerator came back to turn their things in I made sure everything was filled in correctly.

At the end of the day the CFS came to pick up the turned in files so she could return them to the office. She thanked me for my help, and said she might be calling on me again.