D-591

That's the form you fill out when you are involved in an automobile accident while on Census Bureau business -- like when I was rear-ended on Highway 99E in Albany yesterday, on my way to Salem for training as a fingerprinter.

I don't blame the other driver -- the car in front of me made a sudden stop, so I made a sudden slow-down, and so did she, only not quite enough.

The Sputnik's plastic rear bumper was shattered, but there was no other damage to the car or to me, so the bumper served its function admirably.

A couple of phone calls, and it appears that a bumper off a junked Escort can be obtained and attached for under $300 (touch wood), so not too bad.

There was a time when I would have suffered pretty severe traumatic reactions to a traffic accident, even a minor one, and worse yet I would have loudly denied any such thing. As it was, I did have some strange emotional responses, but I noticed them and calmed them. I really do like my post-psychotherapy self.

Today, I spent a total of ten hours helping batch-process enumerator trainees. That was pretty stressful, too, but I survived that, too.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are going on a trip -- oh, wait, you already did...."\\

Census Work -- It's a Living

I'm training this week to be a Crew Leader for the 2010 Census, visiting and interviewing the people who haven't returned their questionnaires.

"May you live in interesting times...."

I have never had anything like a managerial job (unless you count teaching a middle school history course). This is something totally new to me.

I kind of wish I hadn't read that blog post, though, about the guy threatening to greet census workers with a shotgun. I feel worse about the prospect of sending enumerators out to interview people like that than I would about going myself.

Oh, well. If I totally hate being a manager, or totally stink at it, it will only be for a few weeks. And if it turns out I like it, that will be something worth knowing.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Seek, and ye shall find."\\

Drywall and Firewall

We're putting up drywall on the living room ceiling, getting sore arms, also getting the occasional faceful of plaster grit/dust/soot from the fire of 1948, gradually getting some ceiling covered.

As I write these words, we're taking a break with a mocha and an apple fritter, feeling perfectly entitled to do so (and it takes some doing to really feel entitled to an apple fritter, what with the grease and the sugar frosting), and I'm struggling with an infestation of "Vitsa Antimalware 2010".

It seems especially unfair to have to deal with a fake Vista program, considering I'm not even running Windows Vista....

Anyway, does anybody know what to do when a viral nasty walks right in past your Norton 360 like it was asleep on the job?

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Try to put computer viruses in perspective."\\