My day began at 10:00 am today, which was full of making calls. Hillary Clinton plans on making three different stops in the area (Dubuque, Manchester, Maquoketa), and I was calling people to invite them to the event. I plan on going to one of those events to see her speak and hopefully meet her!
Around 3:00 pm, I was told that we needed to go to the Dubuque Airport to pick up two vans that we rented to drive people around on caucus day. One fellow Hill Star (volunteers from outside of Illinois) drove me and another Hill Star to the airport to pick up the two vans. I was surprised to find out that these were not easily drivable mini-vans which are similar to driving an SUV, these vans were monsters. They are 8+ penger vans that will crush almost anything else on the rode, sans semi trucks. I was a bit skeptical about my ability to maneuver one of these gigantic vehicles, but for the sake of the country I climbed up to the driver's seat. I was high above the road level I am used to (I used to drive a Jeep Grand Cheorkee and am now driving a little Honda Civic), it was a bit intimidating. As I started the drive back to the office though, I gained confidence. The bulky van was exceptionally smooth for its size, and the ride back to the office was event-less (one volunteer had driven into a ditch earlier in the day, she and the car are okay). As I turned into the parking lot, I decided that I did not posses the skills necessary to park the monster van that I had successfully driven across town. I handed over my van to a staff member to park.
The rest of the day, I used a scanner to enter people into a computer database. I was entering information about the calls that were made. For example, I would enter if the person was supporting Hillary or not, and whether or not they would caucus. There were many different bar-codes printed out on a piece of paper, and each bar-code corresponded with a possible response. This made the process relatively quick even though there were hundreds of responses that needed to be recorded. The difficult part about this process was that everyone making the calls had a different system for recording responses. This means that I had to decipher every person's code. Another volunteer and I came up with a new system to standardize the responses callers write down. We plan on implementing that system tomorrow and hope that it makes data entry a little simpler.
Later that night, as I was scanning, an entire convoy of 8 vans (similar to the ones that I drove) turned into our parking lot. It was a pretty wonderful sight, especially thinking that those vans would be full of people caucusing for Hillary. All of the cars/vans in Iowa have been rented already, and this convoy came all the way from Chicago. Everyone in the office started laughing, and we welcomed the drivers in the office to relax after their snowy journey.
I thought I would be getting out of the office by 9 pm. I ended up staying until 10:30 or so. I was also asked to make my regular hours from 10 am to 10 pm, and I am sure that they will extend past those as well. It is tiring and my brain was starting to turn into mush by the end of the night, I can't imagine how the staffers who have been doing this for an entire year feel. I am here for Hillary, not to rest, so I will be working as much as possible. More interesting stories to come!