Dear Heidi: Procrastination Pays Off

I'm not sure how this happened, but my address was "randomly" selected for the US Census Bureau. While you might have some mistaken impression that this is in any way impressive or prestigious, what it really means is that you have to (by US law, "have to," not just because you feel guilty about it "have to") fill out this long and boring form full of personal information about your living arrangements, your job, and your self in general.

They first sent this thing to me several months ago, and then sent it again with a reminder letter including a friendly reminder that MY RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. So, Heidi was over here one night and filled out most of it for me, but left the particularly personal stuff for me to take care of, and of course, I promptly buried the thing under a stack of papers and forgot about it. The problem with all this law stuff is that there's not an actual deadline, and I’m counting on the due date as the date I should start working on it.

Fast forward to um, today - and I came home to see a letter taped to my door. My first thought was that the effing Health Department had been back by to scold me about the weeds and dog poop in my yard (this actually happened back in September). My second thought was that one of my tenants had posted a shitty letter on my door (this actually happened in October). But it turns out that it was a letter from the Census Bureau letting me know that they were in my neighborhood, that they'd be back to conduct a survey, and that MY REPSONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. Uh, yeah. I know. But there's no deadline.

I was reading the letter and thinking to my self, "self, you have got to send that letter in" when there was a knock on the door, and you'd think I'd have known it was them, but I actually thought it might be one of the tenants coming to tell me that Manus had gotten into their apartment again (Um, seriously? Have you considered closing your doors? That might help to keep all kinds of things out: dogs, cats, dirt, cold, uh, squirrels...whatever), but it turns out (surprise!) it was the Census Man. We sat on my front porch steps and he filled out the survey on his laptop in about 5 minutes. That guy is good.

So see, Heidi, the lesson here is: if you wait long enough to do something, someone else will surely do it for you.