A census worker darkened our doorstep

All of our friends were getting their census forms this spring. I went to the mailbox and pulled out a very thin letter from the census department. I was excited, yes!, we had gotten the short form! No, we got a letter that said that our form would be arriving sometime in the next week. A couple of weeks later we got a postcard that said that we got our form. Hmmm. They managed to get the preletter and the post postcard, but not the actual census form. Not wanting a census worker to come to our house and start nosing around, I grabbed a short form at the library and sent it in before the deadline.

Fast forward to us cleaning the garage. A man we know, that use to go to our church, comes walking up the driveway. At first we thought he was someone coming to buy a goat, but no such luck, he is working for the census for a few weeks.

I told him we sent it in our form. He didn't know what happened to it because he had a form there with our address on it and he was eager to get the blank spots filled in. If it has been someone I didn't know, I would have refused to give the answers since I did truly send the form in, however, with him he could have filled in a lot of it without us saying a thing. Wanting to help him get through his census tasks he had been given, and because he had the short form, we answered the questions and he filled in the blanks.

The only thing we had a little discussion about was Dancer's name. She has a name that is a nickname for a popular name. Her name is like being named Sue instead of Susan. When we named her we never thought this would raise any eyebrows but it has. I have even had arguments about her name, people insisting that they need to put her full name on a form and me patiently explaining that it is her full name. With all the unusual names out there, we never thought Dancer's would cause such a stir.

I should say a bit about the man who came for the census. He and his wife are just wonderful caring people. One time his wife sent me a card because she thought I looked sad at church. He taught our kids in bible school classes. He is a retired school teacher but his wife homeschooled their children all the way through 12th grade. He told me one time to never send our children to public school because he knew first hand how messed up the system is. I guess if a public school teacher's wife is homeschooling their children there is probably something to it.

As for now, I am just happy that we have officially fulfilled our civic duty and were counted, probably twice.