Aging

I went to our polling place at 10:30 a.m., hoping that this would be an optimal time to minimize line-waiting. It didn’t look good at the start as the line stretched out about 200 feet outside the school gym. Oh well. I’m in no hurry. I was mildly concerned about standing for so long, but if I had to, I could sit on the ground, right?

After a stationary spell, an election official called out to the line that anyone with last names beginning with K-Z should follow him directly to the registration tables. I could see about 200 people and like 4 took him up on the offer. 62% of the alphabet, 2% of the line. What’s up with that? Then they called out, "Any Democrats?" No one moved.

A few minutes later Kara joined me in line. She had been at the gym with her friend that was a K-Z, and within five minutes friend had voted and was leaving. The good news is that the friend returned later with little sandwiches for us, after she took a nap, got a perm, and created perpetual motion for a science project.

Another friend if ours was stuck in our line only because she has neglected to change her maiden name (A-J) to her married name (K-Z). I don’t think she’ll put that off again! I wondered if we can change our name to Kara’s K-Z maiden name for polling purposes.

By and by we entered the gym and fortunately there was only 75 feet to the tables. Strangely there were two other lines to our right, and one of them had people facing the wrong way. My suspicions were confirmed when we got a little closer: That was our line. I don’t know why but our line approximated the table, but then U-turned and headed back toward the door. The line left the gym, wrapped around Gainesville, before heading back to the table.

OK, that’s an exaggeration but still, we did loop in close enough to the table to notice there were six workers checking people in. There was the harried A-J lady, and then stations for K-L, M-N, O, P-S, and T-Z. The K-L man sat motionless behind his short stack of sign-in sheets. No one was in his line. The M-N man was working on his taxes. “O” had a Rubik’s cube and was fingering her NPTA badge (Nimble Page-Turners of America). P-S and T-Z were playing a game of Hangman.

Not only did the A-J lady have a towering stack, she did not speak English and had no thumbs. After at least an hour, we finally reached the table. In her broken English she asked us to transcribe The Declaration of Independence. In reverse. And in Pig Latin.

Exaggerating again, but you get the idea. They had to notice that five lines had zero people and one had 18,000. I suppose it was too late for them to do anything about it, and after all, they were the ones who had volunteered to help, not me, and were going to spend a lot more time there than me. Maybe I’ll volunteer next time. Maybe I can be the alphabet divider guy. (A-He, Hi, Hj-Z.)