Voting

As I woke up to CNN this morning, I heard news reports about complications with voting machines.

We all remember the hanging chad debacle of eight years ago. I sincerely hope that nothing happens like that again, because I have tomorrow off and want to celebrate wholeheartedly with my friends tonight. We have tickets to the Obama rally in Grant Park and I really don't want hanging chads in the way.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of faith in the way votes are counted - - and for a very good reason.

I was once a polling official who was responsible for sending in the votes. Really. Here’s how it happened.

About three years, I was laid off from my job. (The building burned down). I’m lazy, so I got a temp job rather than dealing with the unemployment office in here in Chicago. Believe me, working a temp job is easier than dealing with the unemployment office in Chicago. It probably pays better, too.

One of my temp jobs was to set up and take town polling stations in the city. We were trained on how to set up the electronic doo-hicky where people vote, including the suck-and-puff voting thing-a-ma-jig in case anyone wanted to vote by sucking on things.

We were also trained how to take down the voting doo-dahs, remove the cartridge that recorded all the votes, stick the cartridge in this other watch-a-ma-call-it, and electronically relay the tallied votes to a central place.

When I say, “we were trained” I mean, someone demonstrated it at blinding speed within the course of 20 seconds. I suspect they were probably a temp employee from another temp agency.

Anyway, it’s a good thing that I found permanent employment within a couple of days because I would have had no idea how to operate a polling station if my life had depended on it.

There. I’m sure you are all bathed in comfort now.

Now, go vote anyway.