... The Long, Long Day of Decision

AKA the Election that stole Soccer
Yesterday I worked as a polling official on the federal election. I'd signed up to it on the belief that the corporate games soccer would only be on this Sunday but alas they had double the entries and then scheduled all our pool games for Saturday - bastards.
Ahem, anyway I had to miss out on the games to work on the election.

And what a long day it turned out to be.
I've been doing this at elections for nearly 20 years and it was definitely the worst run booth I've worked on - not terrible but a smidgen below acceptable.
Not only did our working day go from 7.30 until 10.15 instead of the usual 9 - 9.30 finish but in all that time I was only given two breaks from the hot classroom we were working in. Granted it was a new team in charge who maybe needed to learn the ropes but how hard is it to keep rotating the staff around?
While I was getting the absent voting area sorted out the rest of the group were taking what seemed like an inordinate amount of time to sort and count the house of reps papers. In the end the Officer in Charge finally decided to let most of the staff go instead of continuing to make us watch as she tried once again to balance her figures. I have to admit that there was a little bit of schadenfreude (or zluradost) at seeing the formerly chirpy and bubbly OIC being brought almost to tears by not adding up properly but in the end I just wanted it over and done with and to get home.

Oh and SoccerBuddy and the others failed to qualify for todays finals.