Post Original Title: Idiocracy: LIVE!

Originally posted: 4/27/2010

So I am in a training class to learn to be an enumerator for the 2010 Census. The enumerator is the person who comes to your door if you don't fill out and send back the census forms that were mailed to you (hint: if you haven't filled yours out and sent it back already, it's too late, someone's going to be coming to your house!). In order to apply to work for the census, one is required to take a general reasoning/aptitude test, which even I found difficult. I was told that the highest score you can get is a 28, and I was encouraged to study the practice test so I could score as high as possible. Apparently this was because so many people were applying to do work for the census, and they needed to have people working who are capable of passing the general reasoning/aptitude test to be able to ask others government-sanctioned questions.

They failed.

I am in a class full of the least intelligent people in a 6 mile radius. I say 6 miles because that is about how far away I am from the place where the class is being held. I'd love to exaggerate and say that these people are by far the stupidest people in the entire world, nay, the UNIVERSE, but that can't possibly be true because the world is a big place and I'm (extremely sorry to say this and) sure there are many far more stupid people on our planet. Here are some examples of how ridiculously moronic these people are.

• An adult (I'd say he's in his 50's at least) male asked our instructors today if noon was AM or PM.
• When our instructor said that the area we will be door-knocking in is about 6,000 people, he remarked that the return rate for the mail-in forms is about 67%. A woman named Kathy asked "How many haven't returned theirs?"
• The government pays us well. We get paid for drive time to and from class, as well as reimbursed for mileage! I don't think the time cards we have to fill out are that complicated, especially since our instructors walked us through how to fill them out yesterday, step-by-step. Seven SEVEN separate people asked the same question: "Do we start our time from when we leave the house?" "Do we include our drive time?" "If I left my house at 7:30 this morning, and I got here at 7:40, what time to I write down?"
• One of the things we will probably have to discuss with parents of college students is how any college student living in the dorms does not get counted at their parents' residence, but at the dorms, even though most parents of college students living in the dorms probably file their kids that live in dorms as dependents on their taxes. It was carefully explained to us that there is no correlation between how people file their taxes and how people are counted for the census. Three people asked the same question - "What about people who are going to ask if they count their dorm-dwelling-college-attending children in their households because they claim them as dependents on their taxes?" Three people in a row, asked some form of this question, one right after another. Even though we had just gone over this.
• A man (another man in his 50's, maybe even 60's) was asked to read each of the questions on the Enumerator Questionnaire, which is exactly what we are supposed to do when we are out in the field. This man was 100% incapable of simply READING the questions. He'd read a few words, then stop and ask a question. Or he'd say some other ad-libbed form of the question. Twice he had to be stopped, mid-sentence, and asked to simply read the question as it's written.

Also, one of today's lessons was "How to print legibly."

Not to toot my own horn, but I am way too intelligent to be doing this. However, I entertain myself by getting on facebook every other minute and attempting to text about 9 people at once. I still follow along with the things the instructors are teaching about, in fact, I think they thought I wasn't paying attention because I fell asleep two separate times this morning. At the end of class today, I was chosen to stand up in front of the whole class and act out a little scenario in which I pretended to enumerate at a dwelling (mobile home) with 7 people living in it. Afterward, the instructor told me "That's pretty much about as perfect as you can get." I karate-chopped the shit out of those brainless ratards!!!