obama office

Went to a training session at the Obama office this evening. They want those of us working the front desk to be able to handle most everything that comes in the door, freeing up the field organizers to focus on their work. So they had to get us up to speed on how to do all the different kinds of data entry, voter reg, and phone banking, so we can teach walk-in volunteers how to do whatever it is they're going to do. It was a lot of training. I'd be worried about remembering everything, except they promise we'll have copious notes in a notebook which will stay at the front desk.

The office has gotten so busy that from now on we're going to have two people working the front desk: one to answer the phone and greet walk-ins, and the other to train walk-in volunteers and assign tasks to them. And do data entry during lulls. I'm up tomorrow morning and it looks like I'm going to be the data entry/training person. Which I'm pretty comfortable with. I haven't done much front desk work so I'd rather do volunteer training than answering whatever off-the-wall requests come in the front door.

If nothing else, I won't have to deal with the indignant people demanding their yard signs which we don't have. We never have yard signs, because we always sell out a day or two after getting them. And I have no patience with the yard sign people. My problem with yard signs is they are useless. They have zero benefit as far as persuading voters. All they accomplish is making the person with the yard sign feel good about themselves. Which can even have a negative result, if the person with the yard sign feels like they've done their part by putting up a yard sign, so they don't have to do anything that might actually help. And they are a huge hassle at the campaign office, making the folks there stop doing productive things and deal with the people who want yard signs. So yard signs are actually worse than useless.

There's an interesting discussion of yard signs in the comments of this fivethirtyeight.com post, which is in itself a very interesting discussion of voter files, i.e. why canvassing and phone banking are so extremely valuable. Someone there proposes the only plausible benefit I've heard: a local organizer can use yard signs to identify and make contact with potential volunteers. By the way, I will be the first to admit: I have an Obama yard sign. I guess that makes me a total hypocrite. What the heck, I wanted to feel good about myself. At least I ordered mine off the website, so I didn't waste anyone's time at the local office.