One, Two, Three--No, wait, I counted you!--Three...

I haven't posted in awhile, because a new temporary job is keeping me busy. For the past five weeks I have been a field operations clerk for the U.S. Census Bureau in Northern Kentucky.

It's nice to have some letters behind my name (FOC), although I am learning that the English alphabet is a much inflated currency within the federal government. Everything in the office has an acronym. Last week I worked 10-hour days pasting AA labels on NRFU EQs, being careful to remove all LMRs while grouping them by CLD. If this means nothing to you, join the club. My boss is an OOS (an acronym I’ve yet to learn, but one that seems fitting), and the U.S. Census Bureau's computer system, which crashes with kamikaze reliability, is called PBOCS (pronounced "p-box"). There are FOS districts, ICRs and GQEs. There are, in fact, more acronyms in this job than permutations of our humble 26 letters--a shortage the government offsets with numbers. I fill out a D-308 form to be paid, I stack I-1.12-T boxes, I process D-201s into the computer, and so on.

When I'm able to take a step back from the day-to-day operations, I can see that the Census is a remarkable undertaking. The goal is to paint a freeze-frame image of the country on April 1; how many people were living where and with whom. That means collecting jail rosters and nursing home registries, walking the streets to count the homeless, and knocking on the door of every home that did not mail back their census form. Gathering this data for Northern Kentucky alone is a staggering task--the thought of hundreds of offices across the country doing the same gives me vertigo.

The Census is also a fascinating experiment in interpersonal dynamics. The Bureau has hired about almost a million temporary workers across the country to file papers, knock on doors, and keep the computers running. (Notice the recent drop in the national unemployment rate? Thank the Census Bureau.) Prospective census workers need only sign a few application papers, take a very basic half-hour written test (one of the more challenging questions on mine was "What is 3092 - 97?"), and wait for a phone call. The employees, as you can imagine, are diverse. Our office roster includes former pilots, architects, and veterans; journalists, retirees, and electricians; church-goers, pagans, and jazz musicians. Every personality type is represented.

Over the past five weeks--and I don’t think I am paranoid to say this--I have suspected there is something very New Deal-ish behind the Census 2010. Many tasks that I do in a day, a computer or a machine could do in minutes. And yet the office is full of people getting paid, more or less happy for the job, even when it is tedious. All of us inject our own sense of purpose into the work, as humans do when we question the consequence of our days. It is the existential answer to life, and we need it, and I am glad to see it in action.

Is the government intentionally hiring hoards of America’s unemployed simply to get them out of the house and to stop thinking about the recession? If so, it worked for me. I happily walk the ten minutes to the office each morning, swinging my lunch sack and stopping to smell the lilacs. And if I return a bit brain-dead in the evenings, my mind is clear again come morning, and once a week a paystub arrives in my mailbox, as if to prove that I still exist.