After the rally I worked the front desk from 4-7 at the Obama office. They've got me scheduled for every Wednesday morning and Saturday afternoon now. On Wednesday mornings there's someone else too, and she likes greeting people and answering the phone, so I usually spend the morning teaching new volunteers how to do data entry, phone bank etc. It's funny because I'm not that good at persuasion phone banking (much harder than face-to-face canvassing, which is in turn much harder than voter reg), but I seem to be pretty good at telling other people how to do it.
On Saturday afternoons it's much slower, and I'm the only office worker. So I did all of the above: answered the phone, greeted people who came in, trained new volunteers, and did data entry in between. Sounds like a lot but it was pretty slow, and I had lots of time to deal with everything. We have a new staffer who does nothing but organize the office, so things go much much more smoothly now. Everything is (mostly) where you expect it to be and you can find work for new volunteers without having to pester the field organizers.
One thing I do not like about front desk work is the yard sign people. Who come in or call to indignantly demand their yard signs. What do we mean by not having yard signs? What is wrong with this campaign? I try to explain without rancor that yard signs are not in fact a critical promotional tool, but are actually a drain on the campaign, and if they want to help Obama win they could volunteer or at least buy their yard sign someplace else. Sometimes this gets through, most often not.
I did have a good yard sign exchange today. A woman called in a panic because she had seen a whole cluster of McCain/Palin signs at the intersection of Hope Valley Road and Fayetteville, up near Woodcroft. All those McCain signs, and not one for Obama! She thought we should know because we would want to do something immediately! I told her, "The thing is that yard signs don't actually have any benefit to a national campaign, because everyone already knows the candidate's name. So if the McCain campaign is wasting its time and money putting up yard signs, good. We're putting our time and money into getting votes." She talked a bit about how demoralizing it is to see all those signs, and I said that I understand how she feels, and anyone has the right to put up yard signs at public intersections, and if someone wanted to buy some Obama yard signs and put them there, great. But again, I repeated that in terms of winning the election this would be a waste of resources, and I'm glad to hear that the McCain campaign is wasting its resources in this way.
She seemed pleased by this and thanked me for enlightening her (on the way home I realized that I could have said to her, "if you feel badly when you see those signs, think how the person who put them up will feel on November 5 when McCain has lost and he has to collect them all," which might have made her feel really good). Then when I hung up the field organizer in the next room told me I had made his day. He said he had seen those signs and he knew people were going to be upset about them.
They were planning a "data entry party" tonight to deal with the results of the big "100,000 Knocks for Barack" canvass this weekend, and it was just getting started as I was getting ready to go. I felt guilty about leaving but I was exhausted from this morning (and from being up late last night after the debate). If I get enough rest tonight, tomorrow after the canvass I'll help with data entry.
After the election in Virginia when the voters developed an ounce of decency and rejected Ollie North (by far too narrow a margin), one of his signs was left lying around. I was tempted to pick it up and keep it as a souvenir of what we'd avoided. I never did it, though, just let it return to trash.