It feels like I’ve run a marathon and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I handed over all my Census stuff to my Supervisor on Monday and now have so much catching up to do. I have such a lot of writing to do for both of my blogs, an enormous amount of reading matter to get through for class and some writing to do for The Bookshop Blog I have an idea that will mean a massive amount of writing but will be good in the end. I’m carefully not mentioning the housework as I’ve accomplished some of that this morning.

Delivering the Census is pretty easy although time consuming. You need to visit every house, flat, unit and shop in your area. If the shops are just shops and no-one lives there then you shouldn’t need to go back. I do hope someone who actually had shops in their area will leave a comment about that process as I didn’t have any. If you can’t make contact then it’s permissable to leave the forms somewhere safe. As some of my forms demonstrate, the letterbox is not safe from snails, but some of the houses are locked from the gate and not possible to get to while some of them have nowhere to leave forms.

The first visit for Collecting is quite easy, but again, time consuming. I can’t remember how long it took me to get round my area but it was several days. This is where it’s much more important to talk to people in order to get their forms. We were not allowed to ask the householder to leave the forms outside somewhere as the form is not safe from prying eyes and the weather. On the last day of my first visit I was out until 7:30 that night because I was so annoyed with how long it was taking and I decided I just wanted to get that first pass done and finished with. I don’t recall my statistics at that point but I suspect I’d collected about 75% of the forms and that is where the fun really starts. I really pity those poor people when I’m tired I make more jokes, they must have wondered what sort of person was knocking on their doors.

You’re allowed to go back to each household up to five times. Each time I went the number of forms I needed to get reduced. I could write something about the law of diminishing returns here but I won’t. By the time I got to the third visit things were looking quite manageable. I can’t give you any details here as I actually started doing the second visit while I was doing the first, don’t quite know why, but it meant that by the time I’d finished the first visit on the Monday I had the bulk of it under control had a couple of blocks with only one or two forms still to collect. Some of the flats and units were a bit harder. I did end up with a few people who didn’t come to the door and I never saw, most of them filled out the form online but one lady still hasn’t done anything, I have no idea what the Bureau of Statistics is going to do about her. There were a handful of people who promised to do it and as of today still haven’t. If they do it online before the 5th September then I’ll get an SMS advising me it’s been done but there’s nothing I can do about it as I don’t have my book to record it.

One of the exciting things was receiving the SMSs. If a householder chose to complete the Census online then shortly after they pressed submit a message was sent to their Collector to advise them of the details. There was a problem with the system the night of the Census and they were all saved up for several hours. Mine started coming through about 11am the next day. It was hilarious listening to my phone going ‘bebeep bebeep’ 40 times as 40 SMSs came through one after the other, half an hour later I got another 20 or so. I had the slow task of recording each and every one of them later that afternoon, first in the Collector Messages pages and then transferring that information to the record number for the appropriate house. It felt like doubling up but made an enormous amount of sense later on when going through the book as it made it easy to see what had been done. Since then I’ve only received the odd message here and there, but enough to take me up to 137 messages. We were comparing notes on the Census Collectors Facebook page with how much we were anticipating these messages, when a message came through from my DD I jumped to conclusions about the message and thought which householder could possibly have completed their Census online. My last message came through while handing over my completed forms.

The big question is whether I’ll sign up in 2016 to do this again. At this point in time I just don’t know. Yes, I had fun, it was great to do all that walking and find I was still more or less coping at the end. It was lovely to meet all those people. If the whole thing was happening again right now then I’d be signing up immediately, unlike a lot of my fellow Collectors who are so over it. The problem is that it’s five years from now, so in just under five years I’d have to gear up again and I can’t foretell the future. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, whether I’ll have the physical stamina, the mental stamina or even the time. I don’t know if I’ll have the room to put the boxes. As a Collector you don’t need a lot of room but it does need to be secure, it was challenging finding even that small amount as I have so many boxes of books, other stuff and three other people in the house. A Supervisor needs a lot more room as they have to store four or fives boxes per Collector and might have seven or so Collectors. Am I considering being a Supervisor? Can’t answer that question, I’m not sure I have the skills or previous experience for it.