A Tank of Gas Later

After returning from Charlottesville, traveling back and forth from Mount Vernon, plus trekking all over Arlington, my tank was empty yesterday. Lucky for me, my (pending) new job will give me a gas card.

That's right, I chatted with Matt Robinson, in person, about this job with the Virginia Coordinated Campaign. Matt, the Regional Field Director of NoVA, was very nice, and he seems like he'd been a fun person to work for. After the interview, he introduced me to the rest of the office. When chatting with the Executive Director (whose name escapes me), I mentioned that I was going to be a delegate to the Convention, even though I hadn't been on the slate. She told me that the 8th District was the only district in Virginia that went against the slate at all, yet alone changing two people. More craziness!

Earlier in the day, I was at the Obama HQ where I learned the lost art of cutting turf by hand. What is "turf"? Well, when you go to canvass a neighborhood, you need a plan. The campaign targets a certain demographic of people, from Obama Supporters to Undecided Voters. In this case, we were targeting Unregistered Voters in Centreville. There are thousands of doors that need to get knocked out there.

Now, usually you can upload the information into a special program that will divide the houses for you, but in this case, we just had the info in an Excel document. We uploaded that into this program called MapPoint, which takes the addresses and maps them with pushpins. From there, I divided the pushpins into groups of about 50 houses. Then I searched through the printouts for the addresses and made packets. Later, we'll make maps of the area so the canvassers know where they're going.


I worked on cutting turf for a while, made some phone calls, and then Matt called, asking me to come down to Old Town for an interview. I, of course, accepted. But first, these crazy college kids from Roanoke College (who I had driven to Mount Vernon and back) needed a ride to the Metro. Then when I was at the Metro, my mom showed up, and I gave her a ride to tutoring. THEN, I went down the GW Parkway to the campaign office.

By the time I got back, I was nearly out of gas. Gas, of course, has become an issue here in NoVA, and in other areas where people travel long distances to get to work. The rising price of gas, now at $3.83 a gallon, has led more and more people to start using public transportation again, like the VRE whose ridership has grown for 10 consecutive months, making its weekday average 14,380 riders. Additionally, fewer people are traveling far for Memorial Day. This anticipated dip would be the first since 9/11.

Personally, I'm just happy that my job would be paying for my travel. Otherwise, it would be a very expensive summer. 167 days till Election Day!