Day One-hundred-and-eleven: There's a reason I don't like phones

I traveled to San Carlos again today to make calls for Obama. I made 135 calls in about three hours. Ninety-seven were to no avail as the phone wasn't answered. I have to admire the number of people in New Mexico who are out doing things on a Sunday afternoon, at least I hope that is the reason. I would hate to think that they feel that they are forced to ignore all phone calls and let their answering machines screen them because everyone is calling New Mexico, a battleground state.

Of the rest of the thirty-eight calls: twenty-five were other (wrong numbers, a couple McCain supporters, moved); six were Obama supporters, of which two were multiple and had already voted; five refused to tell me or mostly just hung up; and one was truly undecided.

The undecided and one of the McCain supporters did not know of Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama and seemed to be greatly impressed by that fact. I recommended that they catch the repeat of Meet the Press on MSNBC if they could do so at all.

From the calling list, I couldn't tell whether or not they were cell phones, but there were a few. I even got a couple call backs. From one of the call backs I was able to correct my not at home marking to an Obama supporter marking.

There were a number of young people there, and I mean truly young. It seems that there was a local high school civics class assignment to get involved in a campaign in some way. Some of them decided to call for Obama as their involvement. (I'm not in any position to know whether or not any one in the class joined McCain's or a local campaign.) Two of the callers were even younger, the children of another caller. I was impressed on two fronts, that at least the youngest had a cell phone and that they both were so articulate.

I had one name that I didn't have the slightest idea how to pronounce. I asked several people and didn't receive any suggestions. I decided to call anyway and ask for Mr. [last name] in the hopes that the name I couldn't pronounce was a male name. No one answered. Later one of the people I had asked for help showed me one of the names on her list. She won for impossible to pronounce.

In this calling exercise I made a personal discovery that will serve me well in my Life after Layoff, it's okay not to be perfect. It turns out that neither the Obama supporters or people who supported others noticed, but probably for different reasons.

This three hours of calling did not take up my whole day, but it has taken up my whole entry. The rest of my day is normal, including what I am about to do, take out the trash.