Surprise!

Today I thought I'd share a census story. I was working a little town in an adjacent county last week when I ran across a true freak. This particular town is rather small. Commerce is transacted in either one of the two gas stations, though I did notice they've recently added a keno/video joint next to the older gas station.  The police station is in a rather small trailer such as the ones you see on construction sites and apparently they open it when someone feels like checking their Facebook page.

My supervisors are really pushing us to find everyone we can and get all the information so after I spent some time looking at my ill-designed official census map and roaming around streets sorely lacking in marked addresses and road signs, I located this one dude next door to two vacant trailers that were on my list. If a house is vacant, I have to have a proxy declare the house vacant. I can't decide it's vacant all by my lonesome even if a bird did fly at me from a broken window. Luckily, this man was on my list to visit so I thought I'd complete his form and use him as a proxy for the two vacant units. I did manage to complete all my duties, but not without some issues.

I should have trekked it back to my car when I saw the "no trespassing" sign even though that sign does not technically apply to me.  Being a good enumerator, I went to his door and knocked. I waited a moment then knocked again. I could definitely hear noise coming from around from behind the house. In an effort to avoid a lot of backtracking, I wrote out a notice of visit form and left it on the dude's door then walked around the back to see if I could spy anyone calling out "Helllooooo! Census!" the whole damned time in case there was some crazy teabagger waiting to jump out at me with a Rush Limbaugh DVD and a 12 gauge.

The guy lived on a corner lot so I ended up walking all the way back around to the side road and decided to head back to my car. As I got in the car, I noticed someone sitting on the porch so I walked back up the steep hill this dude lives on and said, "Hi! My name is KAR and I'm with the U.S. Census Bureau. Do you have about ten minutes to fill out a form with me?"

He said sure and offered me a seat a foot or so from him on the porch. He seemed like a congenial sort sort of person so I sat down since it's easier to fill out this stupid form if I can put everything in my lap. We briefly talked about the weather and somewhere along the way I learned he'd been divorced four or five times, but his latest ex-wife still comes over for coffee in the mornings.

Unfortunately, it seems his ex-wife does not come over for sex. Therein lies the problem. I was sitting on the porch with a horny old goat who put his hand on my knee and eventually asked me if I liked having my pussy eaten while waggling his tongue at me like he's Gene Simmons. (The 1970s Gene Simmons, not that unfortunate Gene Simmons boinking that gum chewing girl in that horrible sex video.) Now I've met a lot of old perverts and I thought I pretty well had the guy in control. I politely moved his nasty ass hand off my knee and told him I was in a very happy 15 year relationship with a really big, brawny dude named Kevin and we had three children. Then I moved on to Mr. Horny's age and date of birth.

In an effort to expedite the process, I decided his gender and race on my own. I'm not supposed to that, but seriously. I've got some old fart offering to clean my boat and I'm just not down with that. It took a few minutes of, uh, redirecting his interests to the census form and I even managed to get him to serve as a proxy. I thanked him for his time and made tracks off his property.

I'd gotten about 20 feet or so down his driveway and was making a mental note to myself to never move to this cracker ass town when he called me from his porch. Like Lot's wife, I stopped and turned around.

"See?" he said. "I have needs! Come back and see me sometime!" And there, in front of the entire world, that fucknut was at the edge of his porch poking his pruney penis out from the porch rails. Well. I have never had a complete stranger whip out his penis so I was absolutely bamfoozled as to an appropriate response. They did not discuss penis sightings in that four day training.

I sort of said, "HAHAHAHAHAHA! I see!" and did the chunky woman double time shuffle to my car. Honestly, I think I was in a bit of shock for some time after that because I went right on with visiting other households like it was perfectly normal for old codgers to whip out their dicks on the front porch in hopes of scoring some census cootchie.

In fact, I didn't even know how to explain this to my crew leader so I simply wrote "Warning: Mr. John Doe is a pervert" in the notes section of the questionnaire. My crew leader is a sort of older upstanding, staunch Middle America guy so when he commented on my pervert notes all I said was "Uh. Yeah. I'n not going back there."

How do you tell such a normal sort of guy that you just had a dick shook at you? It would be sort of like telling my dad if my dad were a normal sort of guy who wasn't convinced that the Secret Service was watching him from his neighbor's RV roof.

So that's the kind of crap you could be getting yourself into walking around strange people's houses. In retrospect, I was very lucky because you never know what could happen. All in all, I've been visiting people for three weeks. Some folks are oddly  happy to see me and offer up all their information. Some folks offer me something to drink and some want me to come the next time they grill out. One old dude was drunk at 9 in the mornin, but he was a nice guy and I was pleasantly surprised when he informed me why we have a census. True civic knowledge is sadly lacking in this country. One guy talked so long, I found out he was a cousin to one of my first cousins. Some are agitated by my presence. But other than that one weird freak, everyone has been polite and vaguely normal.

Be good to your census worker. We never know what we're walking into when we knock on your door and we just want to do our jobs. We don't want to see your dicks. The government currently does not have a need for that statistical information.