Voting Is One Task On A Long 'To Do' List
Polling Station: 1446 Francisco Street, San Francisco, CA 94123 Time: 8:00 am
Portable toilet for voting queue. For a highly anticipated day of a landmark election, the line that I joined this morning seemed filled with bored professionals. It was 8 a.m., and there were pinstriped business suits, yoga clothes, and a lone Obama T-shirt queued for the length of half a block outside a filthy garage. People drank coffee out of thermoses, flipped through their 'California General Election' handbooks (so did I), browsed their Blackberrys, used a conveniently located portable toilet and simply waited in silence, occasionally glancing at their watches.
A young man and woman behind me made casual conversation, mostly complaining about the line. “Is it moving slow?” he asked, and she nodded. “Why didn't I vote absentee? I'm going to be late for work.” She agreed that the process was taking forever: “And there are like 50 different things people can vote on.” After five more minutes, they both left the line, deciding to come back during lunch.
This sign was outside the garage.Another woman approached the line and gave a friendly punch to the woman who was waiting in front of me. They chatted for a moment, and the first woman said she was going to move to the “back of the pack.” As she began to walk away, her friend asked casually, “You're going to do the right thing, aren't you?” “Yes, yes,” she responded lazily, as if the reply was a given. I wondered what she thought the right thing to do was.
People who left the garage looked relieved, like they could actually start their days now. I don't know what I expected, but I imagined there would be more enthusiasm than this – professionals checking off the first item on their To Do list before a day at the office. They might as well have been dropping off dry cleaning.
Another young couple walked out of their apartment to find us all lined up right outside. The man, holding his briefcase, said “I can't do this right now. I'll come after work,” and he scurried off while the woman took her place at the back of the line.
When I made my way into the garage, the scene was pretty dim. Literally, it was dark in there, full of junk, and it smelled like old popcorn. People were waiting anxiously for an available voting spot, which looked kind of like open briefcases on tall, thin tables. It reminded me a little of the stand-up cubicles at the DMV where people take their written driving tests.
I voted, fed my sheets into the machine, and was rewarded with the “I Voted” sticker – written in English, Chinese and Spanish (¡Ya Voté!). As I walked out, people looked at me with interest, as if they couldn't wait to be me: finished with the voting process.
I will say, that despite the grumbles and impatience, everyone in line was still voting. They may “not have time for this right now,” come back at lunch, or after work, but they were still coming back. Not voting was not an option. It seemed like even though they were very busy and annoyed about the process, the importance of participating outweighed any of their personal complaints. Maybe the significance of the day was too much to take in, so they had to resort to thinking about themselves. Or maybe they were really busy.
As for me, I waited in line for over an hour. I was late to work, but nobody seemed to mind.
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