In a Congressional Building (Updated)

Right now I'm halfway through my first day interning with my congressman. I still haven't asked whether I can use his name blogging. In any case, I'm free right now so I'm writing. An intern's job is ad-hoc. There is very little instruction and mostly I'm just sitting and watching the other guys do their work. When nobody's given us a job, we do data entry and answer the phones; there are many other tasks but none of them are happening today.

My congressman has about 60 staff members, most of whom are on a committee he runs. I introduced myself to him briefly but he doesn't like to be interrupted at work, as I soon learned. Then I sat down at a desk I share with another intern and immediately started taking calls from crazy people. It seems today is a very special day: the AARP called all their members, gave them a rapid-fire political message, and told them to press 1 to "speak to a real person," which forwarded them to us. Most of them didn't know what was going on and thought we had called them. Some of the callers simply said "don't cut Medicare!" I dutifully recorded all their names. Then I went through over 200 form letters sent to us (called "robos" in the office) and manually entered each of their names into our database to send a response. I always suspected this is what happens to the letters you send on political website. That didn't lessen the drudgery though. And for the finishing touch, the letters were addressed to my senators and not my representative, and dealt with a Senate bill, not a House bill. We had been CC:ed.

One tip for writing your Congressman: don't ask him to vote one way or another on a bill on the day it goes to the floor. I pass on all the calls I get but they go to a separate staff member who reads them in bulk later in the day. It'll probably be too late by the time he forwards them.

I watched one of the staff print out a "Dear Colleague" letter about the Protecting Americans from Unsafe Foreign Products Act. On top of the letter he wrote, "[Rep name]-- Cosponsor this? M." There's the big secret, folks. I am here in the office of the secret elites who control the country, and that's how they get it done.

Yesterday I went to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. I remembered it from when I was little. Not much had changed except now there were updates pasted on some of the handrails explaining that the descriptions on the back walls were wrong. Phrases were used like, "So, this diagram is wrong." Why don't they just update the descriptions, then? They must have serious budget problems... in any case, most of the museum is under construction this summer, so maybe some of it will be better soon. There were also some bigass turtles, sloths, and arthropods. Some kids go for dinosaurs but I was fascinated by the big turtle.

Update: An intensely angry pacifist is on the phone. He wants to know why my congressman is cosponsoring a naval blockade of Iran. I agree completely-- Iran has done nothing to deserve a naval blockade. Unfortunately this guy lives nowhere near my home state and I tell him, in a dull bureaucratic tone, that my congressman doesn't want opinions from outside his district, but I'll try to bring it up with him personally if I get to talk to him. "Warmongering son of a bitch!" he yells as I hang up the phone.