Wednesday

We’re in the process of wrapping up with the Decennial Census. We’re preparing boxes of forms and supplies to be shipped either back to Dallas or to a recycling center. We have lots of supplies that could be donated to schools – pencils, pens, erasers, paper, highlighters, and the like. Boxes of them. I am sure there are plenty of needy schools in our local area, especially with the budget cuts they are all facing. And, the Dallas regional office has informed us that these supplies will be donated to schools in our area. But first, we have to box these us and ship them to Dallas. Then Dallas is supposed to turn around and send them back to schools in our area. Your tax dollars at work.


When we began our current operation, VDC, we had to prepare thousands of binders to be sent back out into the field. It was an intense two weeks of work. Every questionnaire that had been returned to us during NRFU marked as vacant or delete has to be verified. So, we had to print new labels for these questionnaires, place them on forms, and put them in the correct binders. Now, these labels took two people three or four days to print. They were copying one label at a time from an Adobe Acrobat file and pasting it into a Word document. It was being done this way to save labels. You see, they were generating a report for each assignment area individually, and most of them had only a few questionnaire labels to be printed. By copying the labels and pasting them into a Word document, they could use up all the labels on a page. I asked them about the process, and each one of them told me that this was how the technical person from Dallas had instructed them to do them, and surely this technical person knew more than I did, so why was I asking questions?

Well, after we finished assembling the binders, we were given a copy of the manual for VDC to read. There, inside the manual, were the instructions for printing the labels. Instead of printing labels by assignment area (there are thousands of them), the instructions were to print them by crew leader district (there are eight of them). Wasting labels would have not been an issue, and it would have taken one person about 30 minutes to print all of them.  It's like working in an insane asylum.

That's the news from Lake Charles, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.