Obama Needs You and Your Laptop

My blood is racing from all the free coffee down at the Los Angeles Obama campaign headquarters where I spent four hours making phone calls today. To be sure, my.barackobama.com is a great resource for making calls from home, but after Obama's lame vote for the bailout plan this past week I don't have enough love for him right now to rack up charges for him on my cell phone. If you are a frequent reader of my posts you also know what a sucker I am for venues where other hot politically savvy young ladies might be chillin'; also, I am way broke right now, and I knew they would have free food at the office. So I signed up at california.barackobama.com to let them know I was coming, and they gave me a selection of shifts to work.

Now how many of you out there hate being on the phone like me? I don't know if it's a sad comment on lives that are increasingly isolated through technology or if it's just my antisocial tokhes, but I dread making phone calls--even to my best friends. I have smoldering thumbs from all the texts I send. It's nothing personal; I just prefer to reserve my "Hey, how are you?" chitchat for family and sick people. I especially hate calling people to ask them for things, so I was totally kicking myself when the head organizer at the campaign headquarters today asked me if I wanted to do data entry instead of make phone calls.

Data entry? I am the Frickin' Queen of Data Entry (FQDE)! I'm exactly the type of anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive person who is physically pained by spelling mistakes, and every job I've ever had has purposefully indulged me with hours of solitary work painstakingly logging things with code. What could be better for an angry hermit with a mild personality disorder like me than to sit in a dark corner doing meticulous work by myself?

Well, no laptop today, so to the phones I dutifully proceeded. I sounded like a total dipshit for the first, I don't know, ten calls or so, but I got into the rhythm after a while--that, or after enough coffee I could talk to anybody. Anyway, after the first two pages they gave me (36 calls), I said to myself, "Well, that was kind of fun; I'll go back and get another couple of sheets, and then I'll bounce." That kept happening until I had run out two different campaign cell phone batteries and made over 200 phone calls. It was like political crack; I kept saying, "Just one more . . . I need to talk to just one more person in Nevada . . . then I'll quit . . ."

I am actually pleased to report that I had to sit cross-legged and hunched over on top of a small desk the whole time because the place was slammed with people wall-to-wall. Excellent variety--all colors represented, lots of people who spoke English as a second or third language, kids drawing pictures for Obama that were going up on the wall (the pictures, not the kids--and some kids were even making awesome phone calls!), college students, gays, people with disabilities, veterans--all working together and laughing and smiling and constantly moving, waves of them coming through the door and orientations for new volunteers every couple of minutes. Hooray! The organizers acknowledged, though, that they need more people with laptops to help log all the phone calls being made.

Why don't you go down there and add to the diversity at your local campaign headquarters? All happy multicultiness aside (and awesome homemade lasagna too, btw), there were totally not enough hot lesbians down there, neither with nor without laptops. That is why I'm making this appeal to y'all. Please, for my sake, go to [your state].barackobama.com to find a campaign office near you.