I Worked For The Census

A few days ago our beloved government held a hearing to look into the case of two US Census workers from the Northeast Brooklyn office, who, instead of getting information from person-to-person interviews the way they were supposed to, made up information for nearly 5,000 respondents in order to meet their deadlines. It’s sort of like bullshitting your way through a term paper by inventing the references you cite, but in this case, it’s a federal crime.

This was some of the least surprising news of the year. I worked for the Northeast Brooklyn office as an enumerator, aka the asshole who keeps knocking on your door until you tell me who lives there. That part of Brooklyn is extremely tough to count, thanks to vacant buildings, squatters occupying supposedly vacant buildings, immigrants who don’t speak English and live in fear of the government, welfare cheats living in fear of the government, black people who are pissed off the forms include the word “Negro,” old people who refuse to talk to anyone they don’t know, drug dealers who won’t answer the door for anyone but a known client, and brownstones you can’t get inside because the buzzers are broken.

Despite these obstacles, I never made anyone's information up, although I skirted some of the dumber rules the census imposed. For example, if a building was clearly abandoned I didn’t bother finding someone “with knowledge of the building” to tell me so. Others in my crew were less ethical. One woman got fired for staying home and inventing entire apartment buildings, another guy kept lying on his timesheets and getting mixed up about what hours he had been working. But those were the dumb enumerators. It was actually pretty easy to lie about when you were working and how many doors you visited, so long as you were careful to make sure your hours matched the times you said you knocked on specific doors. We all lied on our timesheets. If I got lucky and finished three surveys in half an hour, I’d go home and get drunk in the afternoon and pretend I had spent four hours knocking on doors that no one answered. If I was too efficient in getting surveys filled out, I’d run out of work in my area and get let go, so I was really just following my rational self-interest like Ayn Rand would have told me to.

I got away with my little white lies because Northeast Brooklyn was in total chaos. Assignments weren’t handed out when they were supposed to be. Supervisors, unless they were friends with the Field Operations Supervisor (FOS), got fired every week for not completing enough surveys. There were rumors that our FOS was a crackhead, and one of the enumerators saw her walking out of a well-known crack house. She supposedly hoarded our completed surveys and timesheets in her car, either to run some scam of her own, or just because she was a crackhead. (It’s well known that crackheads like to hoard things.)

In late June, with the work winding down, all the area enumerators gathered for a meeting where a woman who introduced herself as Sonya (I realized much later that she must have been Sonya Merritt, one of the two managers who may be going to jail) demanded that we start completing surveys 400 percent faster or we would all get fired. Which meant if people continued to not answer their doors, we’d have to start making surveys up or lose our jobs. I guess not enough enumerators took the hint, because Sonya had to take matters into her own hands: she dragged a pair of clerks into the back room of the office, gave them a stack of blank surveys, and ordered them to fill them out using software she wasn’t supposed to have access to. That might sound shady to someone who didn’t work for the census, but census workers knew that stuff like that probably happened. You can’t make an omelet without falsifying thousands of strangers’ personal information.

The point of the census is not to count every single person in the United States. That would be like counting all the stars in the sky or Wilt Chamberlain’s sexual partners. Even if you didn’t staff your offices with crackheads, career bureaucrats, and the chronically unemployed, you wouldn’t be able to find out how many people live in any given city. The point of the census is to go through a lengthy, expensive process that eventually spits out a number that seems like it could represent the number of people living in the US. Over time, everyone forgets this number was basically made up, and it becomes regarded as a fact. If you want to know how many people live in Northeast Brooklyn, don’t go through the government, just ask a resident and former census flunky like me and I’ll tell you: a fuckload. That’s about as accurate as the official census count will be, and I didn’t have to break any laws figuring it out.