I talked to around 250 people on election day
(probably more)
in a cold church hall
all of them feeding dutifully in through the
side doors to cast their votes.
I started to get worried
when I realised
the supervisor was being conspicuously noncommittal about
how long we would need to stay back
after the polls had closed
to ensure we got paid.
A book of local constituents at hand, we
flicked through the names
A-Z
These names lined up in neat columns
like thin skyscrapers
and ran up the page:
A skyline of Polish, Chinese, Anglo, Arabic, German, French
names
each of which belonged
to a face which belonged to a
a body
in the line.
The day started to drag shortly
after lunch
the line of people continued
out the door, out onto Gordon street
“Is this Auschwitz?” asked this blond smart ass
referring to the lines and the lists
of names.
"I just got out of jail", said another guy.
"Try my other name", said someone else.
We ended up working
for 15 hours
because
(what I didn’t know was that)
we were required to
count all the ballots
& that meant we needed
to remove them from the boxes,
flatten them out
stack them in
individual piles, slowly filtering
according to the different parties,
some of which were
nutty & weird
while others were religious & venomous.
These people (my co-workers dressed in their purple smock-vests)
they seemed to cheerfully accept
this fifteen-hour bull shit
making asides and jokes about voluntary
slave labour.
About never seeing their loved ones again.
About hand stitching running shoes in some third world sweat shop.
About being in a gulag.
Rosy, the Filipino lady I had been sitting next to all day, rolled her eyes and goes, "Oh no no...this is very badly organised. I think we will be here for a long time".
Hundreds of bits of paper
piled on tables,
a forest's worth of ballots covering
the floor of the church hall,
democracy inaction.
One guy kept finding joke
ballets. For example, someone had drawn
a great, honking cock and pair of balls
like a hairy cannon
& someone else had written in Donald Trump
as a viable candidate.
"Hey, guys! Guys! Get a load of this", he'd laugh
walking slowly across the room,
to show everyone,
to provide levity,
laughing & shaking his head &
taking his time about it.
A leisurely stroll.
On my knees, counting ballots on the carpet, I look up at this idiot
and thought: do you want to be here all night? Do you enjoy being here?
And then four adjudicators showed up:
an impish little man, dreadfully springy in a teenager's body
A looming golem with a bald head
which caught the hard glare of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling
as he shuffled around in a
giant pair of shoes
the soles of which never quite left the ground
& a grim nondescript accountant type
dressed like a 1940's union boss,
steel-rimmed glasses & his sleeves rolled up to the elbows indicating a hard night of work ahead.
A night of really mucking in with the team.
(all he did was sniff at the endless ballots as they were extracted from the ballot boxes and raked into piles. The Senate and the House of Representatives.)
They all stood around, this layer of wage-collecting-meta-management, getting in the way
while we dug like exhausted dogs
through piles of white paper.
"May I ask what you are doing?"
asked the imp,
his hands in the pockets of his high-waisted blue jeans, as he rocked
back and forth on his own comfortable shoes,
perfectly suited for standing around,
pleased to be a useless little cog
in a bloated machine.
(receiving what I'm assuming would be a pleasing hourly rate).
I looked up at him
flexed my spine, felt something pop deep in the xylophone of locked up vertebrates
before carefully explaining the obvious
at which point he nodded his head,
satisfied with his assessment of
the situation.
I staggered
out of there at 11 pm
went home
(only a short walk to the end of the block)
flopped on the couch
complained bitterly to my wife
while she watched updates of what
turned out to be a hung
parliament & drank wine
& ate some chilli.
& crashed with the day still echoing
in my head.
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