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Today was a craptacular day, which turned out to be worth it in the end.

The main thing I learned today is that Monday morning is a much worse time for canvassing than Sunday afternoon. No one is home, and the few people who are home are in no mood to come to the door.

One woman stands out in particular: she got to the door after I had given up, stuck a flyer in the door and walked away, back to the sidewalk. I was already in front of the next house when the door opened. She stood in the open door and waited for me to walk back up to her door, then thrust the flyer at me, snapped "I don't vote!" and slammed the door on my apology. Think about that. She stood in the open door and waited for me to walk all the way back so she could slam the door in my face. You know, I realize that I'm intruding in people's lives and I try not to resent the ones who are rude to me. But I have to say, what a miserable bitch. She couldn't just throw the flyer away and get on with her life? I hope that someday, if she ever has to do something that she really doesn't enjoy, but she's doing it anyway because she believes in it, that no one treats her the way she treated me.

That was the worst rude person I encountered but not the only one. Also, they gave me way too much canvassing for one person -- almost 150 addresses that I was supposed to get through by myself in just a couple of hours. And one of the packets was for a sketchy neighborhood, where I was really uncomfortable being alone. It's funny because when I got there and got out of my car, I heard two young women talking about me, but not in a nice way like the two girls yesterday. They said "she's in the wrong place, she'll be sorry if she goes up there!" I wondered what was their problem, and I actually doubled back to make sure they left my car alone. Which they did. Then when I got a couple of blocks away, I realized that she was right. I was sorry to be up there by myself. I wish I could say her warning was kindly meant, but I don't think it was. It had a kind of smirky schadenfreude sound to it.

Anyway, just when I was feeling tired and sorry for myself and wondering what I was doing out there, the phone bank volunteer coordinator called to ask why I hadn't shown up for my shift. I confess, I kind of snapped at her. I apologized when I got back to the party office, and she was really nice about it. She seems much more understanding than the other guy, at least about putting limits on what you ask of a volunteer. The other guy seems to feel like whatever you can strong-arm someone into accepting, that must be a reasonable amount of work for them to do.

So then in the afternoon I did phone bank. The people on the receiving end of our calls seemed so annoyed that I spent much of the time wondering if we were doing more harm than good. One of the other volunteers actually got up and left in the middle of the shift for exactly that reason. She said she couldn't do it anymore because she didn't think it was accomplishing anything positive.

I asked the people in charge about this, and one guy told me the craziest thing: He said it's a deliberate strategy to overwhelm people with calls. Because it means they're getting the message. Sure, if the message is "we're annoying and we don't respect your time." He said that it would be bad if the call volume and frustration level had peaked on Thursday, but to have it peaking today was exactly what we want.

I must say, I do not agree with this logic at all. But then again, I'm not the expert. I guess we'll know tomorrow whether it worked.

Here's the funniest part: That volunteer coordinator who told me about this policy, walked through the phone bank while several of us were having the same conversation. It went like this: "Hi, I'm a volunteer with the Maryland Democratic Party.... Oh, I'm so sorry. I'll tell the system to take your phone number off the list. Sorry to take up your time." (Over half the calls I took went like that, if I even got that far before they hung up on me.) His response was to chide us that it was okay to promise to take people off the call list, but that we should still finish the call by reminding them to vote Democrat! Sheesh! He happened to be standing right next to me, and I told him that if I had a person say "For god's sake, I keep telling you that I'm voting for the Democrats, please stop calling me," I was not going to close the call with "Don't forget to vote Democrat!" It reminded me of the mayor on The Simpsons blurting out "Vote Quimby!" at every opportunity, no matter how inopportune. (Then again Quimby does get re-elected every time.)

I kept track of the numbers during the afternoon, to pass the time. Note: these number don't add up because some people were in more than 1 column. Also, I didn't count calls where I had nothing but dead air or an answering machine. If I could hear the "click" of someone hanging up on me, I counted that call.

105 calls (for 3 hours, this was a pretty low call volume. I spent many idle minutes waiting for the phone to give me a call)
46 "yes I will vote Democrat" (some of these sounded like they were just saying anything to get me off the phone)
59 people I punched in "rude" to get them off the phone list
9 actively rude people (not including people who simply hung up on me; these were the people who took the extra effort to say something rude)
2 "I'm voting Republican"
2 "undecided"
3 "not voting"
7 "already voted"
10 non-English speakers
1 fax line
1 "needs ride to poll"
4 nice people

There were also a few calls that didn't fit into any categories, like the poor woman who told me she couldn't vote because she had fallen down. I asked her if she meant right now, and she said yes, she had just fallen down. I kept asking her if she needed me to call an ambulance and she was a little incoherent, but eventually she got across that her nephew was with her and she didn't need a doctor, but she wasn't going to be leaving the house tomorrow. I hope she's okay.

I found that 1 nice person got me through 10 rude people or hang-ups. Which meant that there were almost enough nice people to make the afternoon go okay. The nice people were really, really nice though. One of them told me that she knew how hard cold calling was and thanked me for doing it. I swear, after the day I'd had, I almost cried when she said that.

The best call was the woman who needed a ride to the poll. It was a sad story: she told me her husband had died in May, and that he had done all the driving, and the two of them had voted together every year. She seemd really happy and grateful that I had called. I told her that I was going to punch in a code and then someone would call her back to arrange her ride, but since I didn't know when that would happen, she insisted on giving me her name and phone number. I gave it to the nice volunteer coordinator who promised to call party headquarters in the woman's area (Baltimore City) and arrange her ride. Now I know that one person is going to vote because of me, who wouldn't have otherwise. That makes the whole miserable day worthwhile.

Tomorrow they did have me scheduled for 12 hours of canvassing, but I told the nice coordinator that wasn't going to work, and she cut it down to 8 hours. So I don't have to be there until noon. I also told her that if they sent me to another bad neighborhood, especially after dark, I was going to leave. She promised me that she would be on top of that tomorrow. She didn't say it explicitly but I think she meant that the two guys hadn't been thinking about canvasser safety, but that she was & wouldn't let it happen again.