Wednesday Oct 3 Updating the voter lists‏

Primo has purchased these voter lists from the Polka Dot party. You can select names by neighborhood, likely party affiliation, voting record, sex, age, whatever. So he generates lists of the people he wants to target and we take these lists with us when we do doors. After you talk to someone, you score the person: 1 for someone likely to vote for him, 5 for someone who would never vote for him.

There is also a dropdown list for indicating if someone was not home or if the person has moved or has died.

Once we have the data, I go back into the database and input our information.

Some of it is useful just to us, but the moved/died information is defintely useful for the party.

So apparently, there is a small discount on the list price.

Whatever.

So I was inputting six weeks' worth of data - it's not hard, it takes about ten minutes per list and there are a couple dozen lists - when I got an error message that the list was more than 30 days old and I couldn't open it.

I emailed Ralph, the communications guy, who told me he would get to the bottom of it.

Part of the problem, as defined by Ralph, was that Samantha had never told Primo that he had to update the data within 30 days of pulling it from the system.

Then I told Primo, who freaked out because that is how Primo rolls. He does not like surprises. Bless his heart. I thought I was a control freak but I am piker compared to him. Plus he is already stressed out because of Isabel wanting more money. Which she is not going to get but man, what a crummy situation. What do you do when someone is in bad financial straits because of illness but also because of very poor financial management? She has gotten a lot - OK, I'll just tell you - she has gotten over $150,000 from Primo over the past five years. That is money we have not had to save for retirement. That is money that means that we don't take expensive vacations or buy new cars. We live very, very frugally. We do not go hungry, but we don't have money to throw around, mostly because of the alimony. She has gotten enough that she could have paid off the townhouse where she and Primo lived. But it has not been enough to pay for the house that she bought after the divorce, which cost a lot more than the townhouse. It's cuter, but more expensive.

Anyway. Primo is stressed because that's hanging over his head. He feels an obligation to make sure she is taken care of. Not to give her more money, but to talk to her daughters to ask them to step in. Isabel has not been sharing the financial details with her children. They are fine people, as are their husbands, so I know they'll do what's necessary, but Primo feels this burden of obligation that I do not share, probably because I was never married to Isabel. She is not an evil person. She is not a bad person. But she is a very bad money manager. Who should step in? That's the big question and one that I am not prepared to answer.

So Primo was not happy about the voter list thing and got all stressed out, which stressed me out because I remember when my life was simple and stress free. I miss those days. I really do. 

Fortunately, Ralph was able to get me access to the old lists, so everything is fine, but there was some tenseness. I cannot wait for this election to be over.