Fired!

Hah! I can return to this blog, because my stint as a political canvasser for an environmental group ended! Yup, you can take the writer away from verbose prose, but you can't take verbosity outta the writer!

I tried; I did. And I earned money to pay for Christmas gifts. But honestly, getting fired was a relief. I was so afraid that one of those prim matrons coming out of Trader Joe's was truly going to spit on me. They wanted to, I could tell.

I used to be rude to canvassers. Never again. I will never walk by and lie and say I'll come back when I won't (one lady did, bless her, in a month of canvassing). I will never snarl and give them the evil eye. How could I have been so nasty? Maybe this month of being a (lowly) paid canvasser was karmic payback. It is hard work.

On the plus side, you get to be outside all day. You get to meet nice people often. People tell you "Good luck" and "God bless you for doing this." (usually, they tell you this just after explaining why they can't give you any money.)

One the minus end, there are all those nasty old people who growl and want to spit at you. And there's that troublesome part about talking people out of money when they've just told you they have none, that they've been laid off and are taking care of sick parents or are nearly homeless. That's where the fired part comes in. A good canvasser never gives up--a good canvasser will talk that recently laid-off person out of their last five dollars. I wimped out. I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Thanks for stopping to talk to me."

I'm so glad I got fired!