23:04 - 31.01.06
rush hour
Since all the most obvious candidates for our defeated Prime Minister's job have stated they won't run, I am wondering if the way is being cleared to put one of the people who made such a splash in parliament this spring when she stunned just about everyone with a momentous decision in his place. Make for an interesting election. This morning we received a memo from EC telling us we had to store a goodly amount of our election supplies in our home - no asking for consen,t of course - because they view the next event as imminent. The two kind of go together as far as I can see.
One thing I forgot to mention was the call I received from the third place party agent the evening before the election itself. She stated that she was watching the news and was letting us know one of the polling sites we had booked was "fully engulfed in flames". Rather than panic I asked staff to check their sources while I checked mine to get a better sense of how big a problem it was going to be for us. Even watching the late evening news there was still no mention of a fire anywhere in the city let alone the probalbe destruction of a public school by flames. I'm still puzzling over that one trying to figure out the intent of the call. Doesn't make sense to me. As it was I had made arrangements with both school boards and one of the public recreation centers to provide backup facilities should something go wrong with a designated polling station. At the time of booking that I was thinking more along the lines of freezing weather causing a burst water pipe or something similar. Fire, water, wind, earth and spirit - never know what might act as a catalyst, eh?
The day after polling day was like walking into one's frontroom on Boxing Day - that day after Christmas Day clean up. Paper and boxes everywhere. It took a day and a half to organize everything so that all the people who had registered to vote on polling day could be entered into the database before we collate then transmit the final voter's list. The data entry itself is quite time consuming because we have to check province by province each name on a registration certificate to ensure they aren't already registered as an elector someplace else. 26 million names give or take a few 10,000s or so, to go through.
I was working on the statutory duties necessary as a next step with my assistant and two of our staff. We have to go through each ballot box to check the accuracy of their paperwork and also their close out of their poll. That sounds simple in theory, but becomes quite complex. It is an extension of the "whisper game" where the first person in a long line whispers a phrase to the next and so on down the line. By the time the last personreceives that messages it usually comes out as something totally unrecognizable from the initial phrase. Some of what we found in the boxes was beyond our comprehension given we were all present at at least one training session each - all my staff were required to attend at least one so they could respond to worker questions before the event remember, dear diary? How didi a team come to the conclusion they were to do what they did. Don't know. Side by side two teams of polling day workers sat all day but came up with two entirely different ways of executing a close out of a ballot box. Multiply that by 227 and the possibilities were endless. Ditto for the polling station supervisors who were all trained in one of two sessions. Entirely different ways of managing their staff. Oh well.
Finished the statutory work on time - 24 hours for the entire analysis and data entry - but with just minutes to spare. Part of the problem was the constant interruptions by people came by just to visit or to conduct their own business. The landlord wanting to show prospective tenants around for example. The biggest problem datawise was those darn mobile polls. They were at issue again in the data base. You see we had to enter our after election results and comments on each poll into the database before transmitting it to Ottawa as the final results. The software would not allow us to enter the mobile poll results in as they actually were. Finally found a solution but it still wasn't correct according to the software. Called the emergency contact in Ottawa and asked her what to do. Transmit anyway. Fine please note the difficulty so I don't get fined for "incomplete" results when I don't have anyway of defending myself against defective software. As we werer transmitting that information a memo from Ottawa. Deadline for all polling day registration data entry by the end of Friday. No mention of how to do that with a suite of 10 computers all on dial up modems moving at the speed of turtles with intake. A batch of 4o requireda minimum ofan hour's work and that was if there were no oddities at all. A lot of the registrations required a fair amount of research to verify different aspects of the information necessary. Called Ottawa on the Friday to ask for an extension to Saturday and was told they really didn't mean it. Oi.
All of our computers were going full tilt as the team that had gone through the analysis of the ballot boxes shifted gears and began the process of packing up the office and decommissioning those boxes. Sounds simple except that one is talking about government procedures and statutory requirements. Everything packed and labelled just so don't you know.Deadlines for everything too meant that there was a big push for all the tasks to be done by the end of Saturday. The other reason is that we are not allwed to have any staff past that Saturday night deadline. Makes it a very tense few days trying to get all the pieces put back to what they were the day we walked into an empty office and opened up for business two months ago. Canada Post came by today to pick all those 300 boxes up in 11 monotainers. I'll tell the security breach and going postal stories tomorrow though when I've caught my breath.
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