I don't know if I've described our daily meetings yet, but we meet our crew leader, Ron, daily in a park in our neighborhood to turn in timesheets and completed EQs. It's a really nice spot, and I love my commute because I get to cut through the wooded section of the Forest Hills Cemetery to get there. Perfect! Well today, we were joined by another enumerator I hadn't met yet. He's got a block over off of Blue Hill Avenue.
When he pulled out his timesheets and completed EQs, I could tell instantly that they were all jacked up. Check marks instead of Xs, horrible lowercase handwriting (we're supposed to write in very specific uppercase lettering), and lots and lots of missing information. Ron handed off his pile of EQs to the crew leader assistant to check, and yes... there were more mistakes than correct entries. Boxes not checked, whole sections skipped, Male and Female options BOTH checked for EVERY member of one household... you name it, it was wrong.
Meanwhile, while his EQs were being reviewed, Ron was going over his timesheets. Again, everything about them was totally jacked. "So I see here that you worked 8 hours yesterday, and you're claiming 23 miles for mileage??" Reply, "Yeah, people don't want to answer their doors so I just circle around the block a whole lot." What? This guy was apparently just circling the block over and over again- and mind you- it's not a big block at all. From what I could tell, he was averaging .5 questionnaires per hour (we're supposed to average 1.2 or greater). When asked about entire sections being skipped, he said that he skipped them because the interview was taking so long! Really, everything about everything here was simply comical.
I kept glancing at Ron to see how he was reacting, but he was keeping as cool as a cucumber. I had a really hard time getting a read on him while he was having this conversation. As they came to the end of the conversation (which took almost an hour), Ron told him to leave his binder and all of his EQs with him until Sunday. Aha! You're finished, d-bag. After the guy left, the first thing that Ron said was, "W...T...F." We all started laughing at the absurdity we had just witnessed.
Ron will have to take this situation to his boss, and I hope he doesn't catch any shit for this. That guy had been running around for almost a week doing this bullshit so they could possibly come down on Ron for letting him run free like that for that long. Also, Ron hadn't conducted his observation on him, and he really should have within the first few days of field work. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for him.
Just as I was getting ready to leave, Ron said, "It's as if he just made up all of the information he put on those forms!" As he said that, I glanced at one of them and pointed out, "Well, look at that... the last names of the people of this household are Dookie and Cox! What do you think?" ...and we all ROFLed".
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