So, my first day on the job doing the grunt work against the recall was interesting. I was quite looking forward to it since right before leaving I got the most annoying phone call ever from the woman who runs that film festival which has been exploiting my talents and pissing me off more and more (and I'm pretty sure does not read this blog). I had spent the last couple of days designing the program (3mb pdf file) for it, some of my best work ever. I had gone through with her the specifics of what this was going to look like and paper sizes and whatnot. I got a couple of confused sounding emails from her about what was the back and what was the front. I had to explain to her (again) that it folds in half and she was looking at page spreads. She wigged. She liked the page spread as a full page rather than folded as a recognizable front and back. So of course, she starts in on talking about changing it and cramming all of the stuff from the back onto the front to make the front look like the full spread (and turn the whole thing into a crowded, jumbled mess). My head was about to explode since as of the day before, I was done with the program and it was sent to the printer and my hands were washed of it (not to mention that I had just accepted this anti-recall work which would be too time consuming to be at the constant beck and call of a picky-just-for-the-sake-of-being-picky-and-annoying client who is giving me intern pay for professional work - and on top of that has rejected my film) I still don't know what the verdict will be on this and now that I'm doing this anti-recall canvass, I don't have the time to deal with it. So hopefully she'll recognize that the error was on her end and that she has a kickass program the way it is and she shouldn't mess with it. Otherwise, I'm in for a bunch of annoying phone calls and more bad feelings. So this was my mindest as I left to start the new job, kicking things in my apartment and yelling expletives. Listening to Ween on headphones on the bus helped chill me out. I got off the bus, asked somebody (who must not have had a freakin' clue) which direction the street I was looking for was, and wound up taking a nice long out of the way stroll through the Tenderloin in the wrong direction and wound up taking a cab to get there on time. We started with a quick briefing on what the job would entail. We're given a list of all the union members and their registered voter family members in a precinct, and we go knock on their door and ask them if they're willing to commit to voting against the recall. Then we ask if they'd also take the safety vote of yes on Bustamante, and if they'd also vote no on proposition 54. If they're planning on voting against the recall, we ask them to sign up for an absentee ballot since San Francisco is notorious for having major election problems and that mailing it in is the best way to make sure that their votes get counted. Plus, absentee ballots have a 90% turnout compared to embarrassingly low polling place voter turnout. So I catch a ride to my precinct with this older lawyer woman who commuted in all the way from Richmond and was really psyched about doing anything she could to stop the recall. She was so gung ho. We were going to meet back up at 8 to ride back to the office. I'll get back to that. So after a quick lunch, I hit my precinct and started knocking on doors. Of course, barely anyone is home before 5 and we're getting out there around 1. So the first few hours are a lot of walking around were not very productive, but they sure were hot and sweaty. As more people got home, it got a bit easier, though a few people completely blew me off, others had already sent in their ballots, and a few are really into going in to their polling places. So after 7 hours of walking up and down San Francisco hills, knocking on doors and talking to people, I went to the Calafoods parking lot to catch my ride back. After 20 minutes of waiting (where I got to see some amazing mullets and a minivan full of mariachis), I called the office. Turned out my enthusiastic partner couldn't hack it after a few hours and bailed and I got ditched on turf for the first time ever in the 3 plus years that I've done this sort of work. I wound up taking the bus. Ack. And I get to do it all again tomorrow (minus the getting lost and ditched parts, let's hope).