CENSUS CONFESSIONS

You CAN recycle these things, right?
Please tell me the environment didn't have to suffer as well

Geez we hate being counted, don't we?

As the census loomed last night, talkback lines were flooded with angry kiwis, all thoroughly pissed off the government should have the gall to ask them personal questions about their lives in the privacy of their own homes.

We really don't like that kind of intrusion. It's nobody's business where we live, (even though they already know that, given they just delivered the forms to us) it's nobody's business how many kids we have, (even though they already asked us that so they knew how many forms to give us) and it's certainly nobody's business what colour we are. (Even though you may well be able to tell that by looking at us)

How dare the government be so nosy! Why do they need to know what religion we are? This is supposed to be a secular society isn't it? If we want to sacrifice virgins at the full moon behind closed doors that's our concern isn't it? (Okay, the virgins are probably be a little concerned too, but you get my point)

In reality, I think there may be some more basic reasons for our resentment towards the census, completely unconnected to any perceived big-brother-watching style, anti-government, paranoid conspiracy theories.

Here's why I personally found census night a royal pain in the arse...

Firstly, I hate doing homework. Perhaps the coolest thing about being an adult (apart from the weird hair that starts growing from more and more strange places the older you get) is not having to go to school anymore. No more exams. No more Mr Menzies in calculus. Best of all, no more homework. Filling out forms at home by a certain date sure feels suspiciously like homework to me. Do you get extra marks for adding tidy borders and a pretty title page?

My next issue was I didn't actually know some of the answers - nobody wants to be made to feel stupid. What am I supposed to put for "ethnicity" for example? Genealogy has never been my strong point and as a result I literally have no idea where I come from. Oh, there have been rumours of a disgraced former pharmacist from Austria, circa: 1850 - but that hardly makes me European, does it? Now I think of it, it could have been Hungary. For all I know I could literally be a black man trapped in a white man's body. Sort of the opposite of Michael Jackson.

Finally, it just takes too damn long. I foolishly assumed if I went for the online option, Google Chrome would autofill all those details you have to provide on any other form. You know, things like address, birth date, phone number, TradeMe password, bank account number - all that kind of thing. I figured that'd make the whole process so streamlined I'd be finished almost before I started, so I volunteered to do everybody's. Imagine my consternation when I discovered I had to fill out each form separately, even though we all live at the same address. And also even though you have to fill out a form for the house itself. What ethnicity IS my house, anyway? Is it religious? Or is that only if you live in a church?

The really weird thing was, although I told the census lady I'd be doing it online, she still insisted on thrusting a massive stack of paper into my arms. This was right in the middle of dinner of course... but after she'd realised she didn't actually have the forms she didn't need to give me because she'd left them in her car. Just as an aside, if you're delivering census forms to people, I would have thought it would be a good idea to carry the forms WITH you, although there could be census subtleties at play here I don't fully understand. I don't think there are, but there could be.

I'm not sure what the census lady would have put down for "ethnicity" but her resulting accent was unusually strong, making her instructions a bit tricky to understand. Like I said, I'd made it pretty clear I was going online this time round but it turned out I still needed a special set of numbers she'd pre-written on the forms. Couldn't they just have emailed them to me?

I heard one census worker accidentally handed someone an already COMPLETED form by mistake. I wish they'd handed it to me. Would have saved a bit of time.

Now my paper recycling box is overflowing with pages I never needed and I've been officially counted again. I feel so used and dirty. And not in a good way. I hate homework.

This could well be where my people come from. Or not