Last night I was offered an interview for a Field Organizer position in Nevada. This was entirely detached from the work I’m doing in PA; mostly likely they got my resume from submitting it online a month ago. They were hiring last night, so I had at most a couple hours to decide.
To put this in context: yesterday was a bad day. My boss was out of the office, and since most of my job is helping her respond to crises, I had nothing to do most of the day. I tried to go home early, but ended up sitting in the subway for a half an hour, then waiting fifteen minutes for a bus, only to get off the bus a mile or more early, because I could not see the street signs and did not know the bus route, and having to walk home – a total trip of almost two hours, without dinner. I was not in the best space to make decisions.
A Field Organizer is given a piece of turf – a neighborhood essentially – and is responsible for getting it organized, and getting as many votes as possible out of that turf. That means: recruiting volunteers, running phone banks and canvasses, making phone and door goals every day – in the hundreds or thousands – and working 14 or more hours a day 7 days a week from now until Election Day. It is a hard job, especially coming in 6 weeks before the election and not knowing your area. The Field Organizer is the person who gets everyone else excited to do tedious work, every day. It requires a lot of energy, and a lot of extroversion – my impression is that as an FO you are talking to people pretty much all the time.
So, the first question I asked myself was: could I physically do this job?
Followed by: would I be good at it? Would I really be helping the campaign by putting myself in a position that I might not be able to handle?
Followed by: but wouldn’t it be nice to be paid?
Followed by: could I handle another wrenching transition right now?
I am not, really, a transitory person. I like to be settled in one place, and have a routine. I do not thrive on change. Change scares the hell out of me. I do not thrive on meeting new people. New people scare the hell out of me.
I believe that we should all face our challenges and fears. But should we face them just because they exist, or because facing them is going to get us something else we want? I would lean toward the latter. In this case, as I talked it over with my mother and various friends, I began to feel that I was pushing myself to do this because I felt like I should, rather than because it was the right thing for me to do. I need to acknowledge my own limitations, as I have tried to do in this blog; I am no good to anyone if I am a wreck. When I am overtired and sick (as I would inevitably become with that kind of schedule) I am not good at putting on a brave face and pumping up a bunch of other people. So I did not call back and tell them I wanted the job; I went to bed, after much mental anguish. They will hire someone else, and I will keep working for free, and the campaign will be better off with me here in Pennsylvania.
So then the issue is how to not have frustrating, wasted days, here. My boss promised that we would sit down today and talk about how I can take on more responsibility. Unfortunately, she is not here, so I am still sitting, wasting time. I am going to give her this morning. If she does not show up, if things don’t change, I am going to talk to someone else in this office and see what I can do for them. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go to the field office and ask if I can help them. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll call Nevada back and beg.
