Working for the U.S. Census
By Jacob Biba
Everything was going swimmingly if you consider drowning a form of swimming.
A week before the accident, I scheduled a trial observation with her—one I promised Phyllis wouldn’t be written down and turned in to the office. When I went to meet her in a quiet neighborhood near my house, I found her leaning nonchalantly against the hood of her car smoking a cigarette. She almost had cool guy from the 1950s down to a “T”, except her car had a flat tire and was parked in the middle of a one-way street.
After conceding to her insistence that the flat tire wasn’t a big deal and she conceded to my insistence that parking in the middle of the road wasn’t going to fly, she got back to work. I followed along reminding her not to skip houses in plain sight, nor park her car in the middle of the street again, nor drive from one house to another when there was only a driveway separating the two—the types of things I would have to note in the official observation I would be doing the next day. It went okay until right before she was about to finish the block: With only two or three houses left, she decided now was a good time to get her tire fixed. I told her I would put the spare on, while she finished canvassing the remaining houses, but she didn’t have one. A tow truck was out of the question, along with the two other options I proposed, so I gave up. Arguing with her was no use.
It was frustrating, but probably good because five minutes earlier I was beginning to believe she was getting it—that maybe she was capable of doing this job. Not well, and probably not in way that could even be considered good enough, but in a way that wouldn’t get her killed.
Before she left I gave her a brief rundown of what she needed to do the next day so she wouldn’t get a bad report on her observation—not that it mattered at this point really. She wasn’t going to come back and map spot those three houses she just skipped. She wasn’t going to pass the observation. She wasn’t going to get fired or moved to a desk job when I turned it in. If three written reports and countless calls to the office about how she was bound for disaster didn’t mean anything, what the hell would?
The next day I found her parked in the middle of the road again. After getting her to pull to the shoulder, and out of the car to begin her assignment—she wanted to canvass the houses from the inside of her car—I followed her around the neighborhood again as she did her normal routine. About three or four houses into it, I noticed her balance was totally off and she was stumbling all over the place, almost falling down a pretty steep hill. My first thought was that she was drunk, but when I asked her about it, she just said her medicine was kicking in and making her feel funny. She kept stumbling down the street, passing by houses and grabbing on to mailboxes to regain her balance. I stood and watched kind of dumbfounded before I could really react to what I was seeing. She was walking like someone lost in the desert for three days without water. I ran up to her and asked her flat out what she was on.
She had taken 1 ½ Oxycontins an hour earlier, and for a person her size—she was barely 5 feet all—and the fact she was probably lying about how many she had actually taken, I was surprised she could even stand. No wonder she wanted to work from her car. I told her she should just call it a day, but she started freaking out about her observation, about how she was going to fail and how I had to keep it a secret. I’m not really sure what I said to convince her to go home, but she finally did.
I had to let someone above me know about the situation, so I called my boss, but he didn’t pick up. I called the guy above him and left a message. Then I tried his boss: She called me back yelling about how I didn’t have the authority to send someone home and if I did it again, I would lose my job.
I really began to wonder what the people in the office were thinking. I mean I could buy the fact they were worried Phyllis would sue if they fired her. I knew they didn’t want her in the office because then they would have to deal with her on a daily basis. Can’t blame them for that. But at this point we had so much documentation highlighting her complete disregard for safety as defined by the Census, that when she did get in a car accident they would have to be liable for it. But I guess the people in the office just didn’t believe it would ever happen.
And then a week later she called to let me know she had an accident. Her version of the story was that she was just driving down the road looking for the next house she was supposed to map spot when she nicked a bulldozer being towed by a big truck passing by. No one was hurt and it wasn’t her fault, but she did a get a ticket on her way home, though she didn’t really know why.
The trooper I ended up tracking down told me Phyllis crossed the double yellow line and started barreling toward the truck head on. The driver saw her coming, veered toward the shoulder, and once completely off the road, Phyllis passed by the truck’s cab, hitting the trailer carrying the bulldozer. Everyone was okay, and once the trooper got there and sorted out the story, he told her to call somebody to come pick her up—he didn’t think she should drive home.
Phyllis couldn’t get a hold of anyone. She tried calling me, but I didn’t answer. The trooper eventually relented and told her to wait in her car so he could write her a ticket for crossing the double yellow line. But before he could finish, she took off. He pursued, but it wasn’t much of chase given the shape her car was in. She pulled over, and Phyllis got the ticket on her way home.
This account was about all I needed, though I had one last question: What made her cross the double yellow line in the first place? “Well,” the trooper told me wincing, “witnesses said she was reading a map.” And with that, everything now made sense: Phyllis was just trying to find her way.