Each day I meet with my supervisor or one of his designated assistants to turn in the completed Enumerator Questionnaires and my daily time sheet for the previous working day. The meeting times are between 8 am and 10 am on one end of the reservation or between 11 am and 1 pm on the other end of the reservation.
Since working out on the Reservation during the day has been very non-productive, and being a bit cognizant that tax dollars are paying my meager $10.50 per hour wage, I’ve been shifting my hours more towards the evenings.
On the 7th I was out on the Reservation until it was getting dark (I’m supposed to leave at sundown) and in the time from 6 pm until 8:30 pm I was getting 3 out of 4 houses with someone home. During the day, however, it was running about 1 out of 6 homes had someone home. So, my plan for today (the 8th) was to meet with my supervisor about 12:30 p.m., go back home until about 5, and work again until about 8:30 pm. I’ve completed the initial canvassing of my assigned areas, meaning that I’ve stopped at every house and at most of them left a “Notice of Visit” because no one was home. So now my task was to complete the call-backs.
As I was meeting with the assistant person, a next-level supervisor came driving up with the instruction that all the Census workers were to leave the Reservation immediately. So, I was done for the day!
With that I decided to go over to Soda Springs and see what was the matter with mother’s new phone. It had suddenly stopped working and she couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I drove over and found that the phone was definitely broken. Pushing the little “talk” button did nothing. I talked with customer service and tried the few suggestions they had to no avail. The solution was to send the phone back and get a replacement.
This phone is a special cordless phone with volume and amplification features designed for people who are hard of hearing. The phone had been working very well for mother, but in the meantime she has to fall back to the old phone in the house. Most people she can’t hear on that phone. I talked with the audiologist in Pocatello where she had bought the phone and they said they’d expedite the process. Hopefully mid-week next week she’ll have a replacement phone. She gets two or three phone calls a day that are very important to her from different family members.
The second Thursday of each month is the Pocatello Amateur Radio Club meeting. Because Census was on hiatus, I went to the meeting. The discussion was about the various digital modes available to ham radio operators. These provide a way to connect a computer to the radio and transmit digital data. This seems very interesting to me and now it’s time to do some experimentation.
Ta ta for now!