Cha-ching

It had been a tough day, but somehow we’d all managed to make quota. We were coming back with right around $1000. Lispenard was already streaming with canvassers when we showed up, some sitting on the front stoop and having a smoke. One of the crews walked dejectedly up the stairs in front of us – when director M____ took their FM’s sheet at the door, I was secretly relieved to see his face. A sigh and a scowl. At least we weren’t the worst crew. Two of this crew had made less than $80, and only the FM had made quota (barely). M_____ murmured something to the FM, and the crew shuffled off to count their paltry haul dejectedly. When I handed my slip to M____, he didn’t really react more than a slight nod.

Cashout seemed at first glance like a disorderly, even chaotic process. Everyone pulled up metal chairs, or sat right there on the floor, and counted the money out into loose piles. As they did so, the stereo blasted music – usually, Lil John’s “Get Low” – and traded stories from out there on the street.

“I talked to this guy for twenty minutes, and he said he would go right to the ATM. I figured, nah forget about it, but he came back! I couldn’t believe it – hundred bucks cash.”
“I got fifty from a Republican!”
“This guy tried to, like, grab me. I screamed and a cop actually saw it. Thank God, what a creep! I’m like, hello.”

The canvassers that weren’t talking were paying close attention to each entry. Every donation needed to be transcribed again on another sheet, including the donor’s address, phone number, email, currency form and amount. For those who had a good amount of donors, this could take a long time. Brows furrowed, pens chewed. People trying to descramble signature scrawl, make out scribbled addresses; others relived each transaction aloud as they went through their piles – people who they talked to for fifteen minutes and gave five bucks; improbable hundos; strange occupations, like ‘futurologist.’ Those who had pulled in big sat with their chests pumped up; those who hadn’t slumped in their chair, looking as if they had spent a good bit of their six hours out there running. Directors roamed the seated crowd, helping to cash out, chatting people up, assessing the take.

Mike came over as I was checking the sums of my crew. He asked how I did – “So so. Better than those guys,” I said, nodding in the direction of the crew that had come in just before us. There were loud complaints coming from them. Whenever anyone approached them, there would be a comment about how the street they had been sent to was “busted turf.”

“Yeah, well,” he said like talking about a misbehaving child, “turf, especially in Manhattan, can never really be busted. There’s hardly a street on this island where you can’t make quota if you know what you’re doing.” Director M____ had walked over and taken the FM aside to talk. Mike nodded at them, “I think that’s probably it for C____. He was on probation already, and he only brought in 120 today.”

C____ was one of the few non-whites working in the office. I didn’t know him, but he seemed pretty well-liked by everyone, and from what I’d seen in training he had a very amusing canvassing style. Complete with a hair pick stuck in his fro and pants that hung almost a foot below his hips, he would slouch and shuffle like any old b-boy, but when he opened his mouth the rap came out deft and slick, like rap.

“They’re going to fire him, or what?” C____ had been on staff, as far as I could tell, as long as anyone. In a group that changed every day, he was one of a handful of people who everyone seemed to know.

“If you don’t make quota a few days in a row, that’s that. Gone. Too bad -- with a different FM I bet he could have made it today…FM’s make a lot of difference that way,” mike said, and I wondered whether my initial reaction to our turf had slowed down our entire crew.
“But to be honest, he was…well, he’d go out there and screw around. He’d just goof off, talk to people, screw around out there.”

Talking to people didn’t sound like obvious goof-offery to me, although it was something I’d already been lightly admonished for. Unless you thought someone was about to give if only you just engaged them a little bit more, you were only supposed to be initiating a conversation or pushing it toward its conclusion.

That crew was finished and getting their things, and Mike went to cash out the FM. I was still training on cash out, learning to do it without checking my progress each step of the way. Each different form of contributions had to be tallied separately – checks were the easiest, credit card slips each had to be signed by the field manager and eventually signed off by the director doing cash-out. Once each canvasser counted their money, the individual sheets had to be totaled and checked, and then each crew’s sheet had to be compiled. Each canvasser had to record the number of credit card donations, the total credit card donations, the number of checks, total checks, the number of cash donations, total cash donations, and other assorted pieces of data like “donations over $157” (we had none) which seemed to be for some sort of filing purpose. Cash itself was the big task, counting each denomination into its own little pile. If something didn’t add up somewhere, the person doing cash out would have to go back and check through each canvasser’s sheet to examine the totals.

Mike came back with the other crew’s forms and cash. He showed it to me. “They say they had bad turf, but look: you can tell from the numbers. they were probably just slack, wasting their time on people who weren’t going to give.”

One of the sheets showed one hundred, and then two fives and a twenty. “This guy obviously got lucky – one hundo, and then nothing. Anybody can trip into a hundred.” I thought about my last-minute hundred – I would have been in equally dire numbers if not for that.
Mike scanned through the rest of the canvassers. The FM had mostly 20s, and a fifty. A third – an observer – had twenty dollars for the whole day. “Choked,” Mike said. “He walked out of here real quick.”
C___’s sheet showed a dozen cash donations; most were fives or tens. There were two ones. “Look at that, each one of those probably could have been higher. He was just slacking.”
Mike nodded over in the direction of the door. Director M_____ was talking to C___, who was shaking his head at whatever M___ was saying. Mike said, “You know, he’s been here forever, he’s burned out. Happens. Used to be able to pull plenty. But if you have slack people like that on board, it spreads.”

He turned his attention back to my forms, and called out a few wrong numbers or missing pieces of data. I apologized for missing the mistake.
“Trust me,” Mike said, “catching it now is not a problem. Don’t let it slip by here, though.” It took me longer than most other crews to cash-out. Most of the rest of the canvassers had filtered out by now; we had to get things cleaned up soon, as there would be a group interview here on the hour.

There was one other FM still checking over his sheet – Josh, who was passing by, asked me to cash him out. I worked over his sheets, trying to get the rhythms down – numbers, totals, averages, there must have been 80 numbers to fill out in the slip. When I was done, I wrapped it up, the FM took off, and I put it in a tattered FedEx envelope and dropped it in the back cubicle.

* * *
Fifteen minutes later, a bellow rang out through the office – “WHO CASHED THIS CREW OUT?” I cringed. There was a large man scanning the office, an ornery look in his eyes.
“That was probably me,” I said, trying to laugh it off in advance. He walked over with the wad of slips in his hand. He was a burly, hairy dude, like an burrowing woodland creature, a bit greasy and rounded out by a belly. He wore garish jewelry and there was anonymous trance music blaring from the computer that he’d been sitting at.

“Is that your scribble?” he asked.
I looked, nodded.
“Great! Another moron to make my job harder!”
“OK, ok, Xtian,” Mike said. “It was his first cash out, I had him get some practice.”
“Well, he’s gonna need a lot more of it.” He handed the wad to me, with a red circle where I’d made some error. “After you figure it out, then you’ll count all of it.” He gestured at the piles of envelopes on his desk with bundles of thousands of dollars inside.
“Oh,” I said.
I almost said ‘yes, sir.’
“Just kidding. You think we’d let you touch the money again after you already screwed up? You’ll just get to watch.”

He handed the envelopes to Mike, who patted me on the back.
“Don’t worry, everyone screws up, happens all the time. Except Xtian – he never once makes a mistake, isn’t that right?”
Xtian had already turned and hunched himself over mounds of spreadsheets. The trance music blared away. “You’d better believe it.”
* * *
Mike and I went into the corner behind a makeshift wall and sorted methodically through the envelopes, separating bundles and spreadsheets into an array of piles. So much money, sorting bill by bill, check by check, through more than ten thousand dollars.

“He’s so goddamn grouchy all the time, but what can you say – he tears through all this paperwork,” Mike said. “You’ve never seen anything like Xtian going through piles of paper.”
Mike was already tearing into the packages of money – counting out mounds of 20 bills each, rows and rows of stacks. I later learned that, for the first couple of months, this cash counting table was out in the wide open – anyone who walked in the doors (and we had some pretty sketchy characters walking in to be interviewed for a job) could see the mounds of cash lying about. Though this cubicle situation was an improvement, it wasn’t exactly a vault either.

It took us at least forty-five minutes to count everything. If there was a discrepancy, we’d have to go back and find the error – was it an adding error on the sheet? Did we count wrong? This time around, it all worked out even.
* * *
We walked out of the office and toward Tribeca to go purchase money orders, which would then be sent ‘to Boston.’ I kept eyeing the package under Mike’s arm. I’d certainly never seen that much cash in one place, let alone have it under my care. The bank was only a few blocks away – I counted every step, and watched the alleys.

As we waited on line, Mike said –
“I really didn’t need you to come along, but I figured you could use the break, huh?”
“It gets crazy in there!”
“Tell me about it. Nice thing is, none of them really keep track of how long this takes, so we can get a coffee or whatever. We don’t really have to be back, whatever they say… So how’ve the first few days been?”
“Pretty good. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Well you’ve done pretty well for yourself, right?” I shrugged. “Too bad you don’t bonus,” Mike said. “You’d be feeling even better about it.”

It hadn’t really bothered me much, not bonusing – if anything, I was relieved to not have that kind of pressure going out there. But I’d been thinking about one of the directors, M___ -- he seemed to be taking it to another level. Together with Josh, M___ was one of the main forces in the office, calling most of the shots and being wherever it was that things were getting done. He was a recent graduate of a top-tier school, and he told me once that he’d been offered “crazy money” for some hot law firm, but ended up going with this.
“And what do you know,” he said, “I’m making as good money here as I would at the law firm.” That was kind of incredible to me, but he explained: a trainer who takes out an observer will collect the bonus from the observer (who is unpaid), and if he were to go out and make $800-$1000 – which he regularly was able to do – he could bring home $400 or $500 a day. Those numbers were kind of boggling to come from our campaign.

“It’s kind of strange to think of all the money that goes through here,” I said to Mike as he signed the money order. “I still haven’t wrapped my head around it.”
“Oh, it’s huge,” Mike said. “This is big business here, for sure. Look at all the campaigns out there – Grassroots Campaigns is ahead of all of them, as far as the business goes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, look,” Mike said. “You’ve got ACT running the huge Get Out the Vote operation – that’s the biggest one. And ACT is mostly funded by Soros. But you also have ACORN, which is basically this umbrella organization for all these Democratic or progressive organizations. So, like, that’s big – it’s huge, you know with campaign finance and the 527s and all that, there’s just all this stuff in the air and no real sense of where the limits are. But they’re all competing with each other, you know, everyone wants to be running the big campaign. Then you have the Democratic National Committee, of course – “

I interrupted him, putting my ignorance in full view. “Wait, Mike…uhh, what is the Democratic National Committee?”
He grinned. “Well, it’s basically the national party structure. But, there’s really not much to it – it’s kind of a big, like, shell. Gutted. They have money and the name, but no structure or anything. Which is why Terry McAuliffe saw Grassroots Campaigns and jumped on it. He just loved the deal, he bought in big time.”
“What deal?”
“Grassroots Campaigns. Basically, Grassroots Campaigns came out of the PIRGs and Telefund and all that” – he said this like I knew what it was – “took their model and used it in a for-profit company. Now, since they’re for-profit, they can shop it around to political organizations. Could have run a campaign for anyone, I guess, but the DNC bought it right away, so Grassroots Campaigns blew up real quick.”
“So, this money that we’re sending in goes to the DNC – “
Mike nodded and finished the sentence “—but Grassroots Campaigns itself is being paid for the whole operation.”

“Huh,” I said as we rounded the corner and stopped in to get some coffee. My feet hurt from canvassing, and we still had another five or six hours of the day left. There was another question that had been bothering me. “We’re all being ‘trained’ right now for MoveOn. Isn’t it illegal for MoveOn and the Democratic National Committee to be – “
“Yes, but technically Grassroots Campaigns is just contracted by each of them, separately. I don’t know the deal with the MoveOn thing, nobody seems to know, but I’m sure they’ve figured out some way to make it legal. Or, legal enough.”
“Either way, this means that the money that we’re raising out there isn’t going to our Get Out Vote Campaign, right? The money goes one way, we go the other, never the twain shall meet.”
Mike sipped his coffee. “Yeah, but isn’t it semantics, really? We’re raising money for ‘the campaign.’ That’s all you need to know, all you need to say.”

* * *

By the time Mike and I got back an interview session had already come and gone. The PM crew soon came in – a second crew of canvassers, somewhat smaller than the AM shift, the PM crew would go out at 2 and come back at 8, just before dark. I didn’t recognize anybody in the PM crew, and somehow this made cash out easier – I cashed out two crews, still slow, but steadier. It required a bit of focus – to drown out the chatter, the “Get Low”, the walls swimming with loud posters, and to just focus on the numbers. A simple grid of numbers, and the corresponding units of currency. “Not so bad,” I told myself, although I dropped the envelopes at Xtians desk as if they contained some explosive material.