On Election Day, Lynn and I decided to help make the lines
at the polls in Pennsylvania and Florida uncomfortably long.
Originally, we planned to go to Colorado, Nevada or Oregon
to drive people to the polls, or maybe to sit and observe
people wait in line, but our travel plans fell through.
Instead, we decided to try to persuade reluctant voters
to spend a couple of hours in line.
A
political action committee, which I’ll call BetterWorld,
sponsored a gathering at a law office in downtown Oakland.
The aim was to call up reluctant voters in too-close-to-call
land and remind them that voting is a good institution.
Neither of us enjoy speaking to strangers on the phone,
but we don’t have jobs right now and guessed that we’d feel
guilty if we just sat around all day, watching the dozen
PBS shows stored on our Tivo, while waiting for the Daily
Show Election Special at 7:00.
Cellphones
in hand, we headed downtown to call the reluctants.
At the law office, a tall man with an earring and an easy
manner met us at the receptionist's desk, pointed out the
bagels, coffee and water and—after a friendly chat—gave
us each a list of reluctant voters and a suggested script
that we could use to build a friendly rapport with the swinging
people of the battleground states.
I
expected this to be a painful experience, but it turned
out to be worse than I anticipated. To start with,
our host, Paul, offered us seats in the firm’s conference
room with the other volunteers, rather than a cubicle, which
I coveted. I didn’t want the other volunteers to place
my face with the appallingly bad calls that I was about
to make. We were there early, but already a woman
was in the conference room, placing rapid-fire calls with
a polished delivery. More people of her caliber followed.
Making calls in front of these people was akin to prancing
about front and center at a modern dance class. Neither
my phone skills nor my dance flourishes are ready for public
viewing.
I
told Lynn that I needed to go to the car for a while to
compose myself. Perhaps with a little practice in
private, I could bear to face the conference room again.
In
the car, I stared at my script for a while, took one shot
at reading it to myself, but was unsatisfied with my wooden,
Kerryesque delivery, which reminded me of a rookie quarterback
recording his first radio spot for the local car dealership.
I don’t enjoy getting telemarketing calls, so I didn’t want
to read from a script, anyway. Well, actually, I do
like telemarketing polls. It brightens up my day when
I can tell someone that, “I am ‘2-somewhat unlikely’ to
buy the new Nelly album,” I couldn’t think of any way to
turn these “urge to vote” calls into a poll, so I distilled
the script into three bullet points:
1)
Volunteering with BetterWorld
2)
Urge to vote
3)
Kerry, preferably vote for
Bullet
points ready, I needed to develop a speaking strategy.
What type of phone voice should I use? I have several,
although they are almost identically dull and monotone,
so the nuances are usually lost on the person hearing them.
I do have one loud, forceful delivery that I call my “vice-president-just-passed-over-for-the-board-of-directors”
voice. When I rang Lynn prior to my first call, her
first question was, “You’re not using your ‘loud’ voice,
are you?” That meant that I only had the different
shades of monotone to choose from: my meek palette.
This includes cheerfully subservient—“Hi! I hope I’m
not bothering you!?”—a factual, “I’m being told to say this”
voice, and an angst-ridden, “the times are a-troubling”
voice.
I’m
prone to the long pause, which is disconcerting on the phone.
In conversation, it’s not unusual for my counterpart on
the other end to use the phrase, “Are you still there?”
Even my parents—who know me well—still do this. It’s
especially disconcerting when the “Are you still there?”
comes during a long pause in the middle of a sentence.
Unfortunately, these long pauses become accentuated in answering
machine messages. Each time I leave a message, I hope
for the best, but fear the worst.
I
almost always begin badly: “Hello, this is Jeff...uh,
Lewis...” Then, I briefly try to remember if I know
the phone system code to start the message over again, which
sets me back a few more seconds before I get to my message:
“Just calling to see if you received the, uh...book.”
Because I feel a little bad about the quality of the message,
I throw in an overly cheerful, “Hope you’re having a nice
Tuesday,” and then pause for a couple of beats to considered
if there’s anything else I can say to redeem the message.
I rack my brain one more time for the phone system code,
and finally hang up.
On
Election Day, I reached an answering machine about 75% of
the time. These didn’t go too well, as you can see
from this representative sample (cheerful voice identified
by bold, factual by underline and
angst by italics):
Hello,
I’m trying to reach Kitty and Manuel! My name’s Jeff
and I’m volunteering with the BetterWorld political action
committee. To urge you to vote! Your vote means…
[Pause, to consider the disquieting path that this sentence
is taking] ...so much. [I become very
sad that I just said ‘Your vote means so much.’ If
only I had mastery over the phone system, so that I could
start over...] I mean, my vote means a lot, too,
but yours is more valuable because you live in Florida.
You are Floridians. [Pause, to wonder why I just
said that and to reflect on the fact that Floridians sounds
like fluoride; also, to consider if people in Florida actually
call themselves Floridians; is it like Trekkies and Trekkers?]
In particular, you should vote for John Kerry because...
oh, there’s so many reasons. I mean [Pause;
should I list them? No, this is going on too long;
must finish now.] Well, have a nice day
and thank you very much.
After
each call, I spent several minutes thinking, “What are you
doing?” before dusting myself off and trying again.
A
couple of hours into the calls, we learned that the BetterWorld
PAC had accidentally sent the same list of numbers to multiple
calling groups so that some callers were being bombarded
with one “urge to vote” after another. When I heard
this, I recalled a couple of particularly long answering
machine message beeps that suggested a long string of calls
from BetterWorld volunteers. I wondered if my hand-crafted,
salt-of-the-earth messages would stand out as a refreshing,
heartfelt call in a sea of scripted statements, or as the
final straw that would turn Boca Raton into a pinkie-hating
stronghold.
After
about three hours, I reached a woman with 3rd degree burns
on her legs, who was waiting for a ride to the polls.
Cheryl was in a lot of pain and needed to know the arrival
time of the van twenty minutes ahead of time, because that’s
how long it would take her to get down the stairs.
It hadn’t arrived yet, so I offered to find out who was
supposed to pick her up. Actually, I offered to have
her call me back in about an hour if nobody picked her up,
but she understandably assumed that I knew something about
the ride-sharing program and asked me to check on her ride.
I assured her that I would. After I hung up, though,
I reevaluated this offer. I knew she lived in Pennsylvania.
That’s not a lot of information to go on, particularly since
I didn’t have any contact numbers for the ride service and
I was sitting in my car, computer-less. I once was
stranded in the Pittsburgh airport; it’s a large airport
with a reasonably priced mall, right in the main terminal.
Like I said, I didn’t have a lot to go on.
I
considered calling her back to let her know that I couldn’t
find the number, but something that she said partway through
the conversation made me really want to help her:
“Aaaghaaaah. Aaaaaaaaaa!” She was okay, she
said, at least as okay as you can be with 3rd degree burns
and the specter of a Bush White House. I decided that
if nothing else, I’d do my part by helping this woman vote.
Maybe, for her, I was an Angel of Hope, although that might
be pushing it a little too far. I have to admit that
I was bolstered by the thought that I wouldn’t be able to
make calls while I hunted down her ride.
I
headed back to the law offices to borrow Paul’s computer.
Somewhere between the car and the computer, I got it into
my head that the woman lived in Reading, PA, so I did a
number of Yahoo! searches on political action committees
in the greater Reading area. I found a likely number
and checked in with Lynn—she tried to persuade me to return
to the conference room, but there were even more slick-talking
phone volunteers, so I high-tailed it back to the car.
The
Reading number was busy, so it was about an hour before
I finally got through to a perky woman, who was about to
help me when I noticed that I’d neglected to note that Cheryl
lived in Pittsburgh. Luckily, though, the Reading
branch had the number of the ride-sharing group in Pittsburgh.
After a number of busy signals, I checked back in with Cheryl
to let her know that I hadn’t forgotten her. A man
answered and told me that she’d already left; I neglected
to urge him to vote.
My
conversation with Cheryl was an anomaly, because usually
when I got a live person, I went to a minimalist approach,
so that I never had to stray far from the cheerful voice.
Near the end, my delivery got so spare that one of my final
calls was, “Hi, Barbara! My name’s Jeff. I was
just calling to urge you to vote! You did? Great!
Well, have a great day! Thanks again!” Afterwards,
I wondered what she thought about this non-partisan stranger—drifting
perilously close to his loud voice—who just called up to
wish her a fine day at the polls. My hidden message,
I guess, was that America is a great, strange country.
At
1:00 am on November 3rd, we got a call from Florida.
A woman was so touched by one of Lynn’s messages that she
got Lynn’s number off caller ID and called us at 4:00 am,
her time, to taunt us. She was using what her ex-husband
probably called her “sarcastic” voice: “Hello.
You called me today to ask me to vote. I just wanted
to call you this morning to find out where you were to see
the returns. HAVE A NICE DAY!” These might not
look like hateful words, but in her hands—in the middle
of the night—they packed venom. Next time, I think
our country will be better served if I just sit around and
watch her stand in line.
Mr.
Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.
Copyright
Jeff Lewis, 2004 |
