Philadelphia VI - the office and the organisation

The shifts at the Obama office in Philadelphia's 36th ward were advertised as starting at 8am, 11am and 2pm on the website. I didn't make it for 8 I'm afraid, but I wandered down there after breakfast and arrived at about 10:30.

There were seven members of staff, and about four volunteers waiting for their missions. By the time I had waited 10 minutes to be briefed and sent out, eight more volunteers had arrived.

You can see from the picture that we were a diverse bunch, though perhaps unrepresentatively white, as the 36th ward is largely black.

I have heard a lot of people talking about the military precision with which local Obama offices have been run, despite the fact that they are largely staffed by young volunteers. This is not quite how it seemed to me. I was impressed with how they were able to find work for the many volunteers who just showed up wanting to be helpful, and redeployed us by chauffeur driven minibus to other areas when we were more needed there. Especially as they must have had very little idea of just how many people would show up on the day.

However, there seemed to be little in the way of a plan of action, and a fair amount of tussling between the various members of staff over how volunteers could be most useful. All this was done in earshot of said volunteers as we waited to be given our tasks, and I was quite uncomfortable to hear the dismissive way some of them talked about us.

I also found some them pretty patronising. One guy was briefing us to go out and check whether the correct door hangers had been left out in various polling districts: we had to make sure they showed the correct polling station as some had been left on the wrong streets. He showed us maps of each district, which were enclosed by a line in yellow highlighter, and explained at length that on the boundaries of each district, only the internal side of the street was part of the district, the other belonging to a different district. He then spent an awful lot of time unnecessarily talking about how to identify which was the north side of the road, saying "but in case you have any difficulty identifying which is the north side, I've got a useful heuristic for you to use" before confusing everyone with incorrect information about the numbering of streets in Philadelphia. It was all rather frustrating, that they didn't feel able to trust us to take a map and be able to read it.

Nevertheless, I don't want to be too negative! The atmosphere in the offices was upbeat, if only from our natural enthusiasm for the project, and it felt like we were all contributing, if only in a minute way. And there was a fantastic selection of food - doughnuts, apples, home-made ginger cake, salad, chocolate bars and pizza (though all at different times - we never knew what might be on offer when we got back to the office!).