Week 2 at Work

I have now officially been working with the Census Bureau for 1 week, going on 2. So far we have done a TON of training and learned tasks for multiple positions. Because I am part of quality control, we do a bit more training than the census takers, and it has been pretty interesting.

It has also been interesting to watch the blogs and posts about the Census as it is getting closer to CENSUS DAY, when the call centers go live. There are so many fallacies and ridiculous rumors going around about how the census is gathering information that will be used to manipulate the public, find out personal information about us, etc. Wow. All I can say is that people really need to do their own research

To sum up the answers to the fears out there, no, the Census is not a ploy to exploit the American public. There is one every 10 years and has been since the creation of our nation (haha...creation of nation rhymes). The information gathered is used for many of the statistics that we hear, fund allocation and most importantly, to decide how many representatives each state is allowed.

ALSO, anyone working with the Census has to sign very strict confidentiality contracts, which if broken, are punishable by prison time and huge fines. These contracts are lifelong and do not even allow the people's names to be mentioned to a non-Census worker. Information gathered will only be released in the form of statistics, with no personal information being used. In fact, no other government agencies are allowed access to the personal information, not even the President. In several decades the details will be released to the general public and used mainly for genealogical purposes. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this method of family history research.

I think the whole process is very cool and very well organized. It'll be nice when we finally get out of the training process and officially start work. AND I hope that people will be nice and do their civic duty by filling out their questionnaires.