Fear and Loathing in Lake Norman

Another night, another phone bank for Barack Obama's campaign. Seeing as how the Lake Norman area tends to be, for lack of a better word, less diverse than the city of Charlotte to the south, I understand that my hours of phone banking are likely to yield few Obama supporters. Most of the Obama supporters in this area have already been identified, leaving us phone bankers to pick through those voters who have classified themselves as unaffiliated with any political party. It is a thankless job, really - calling people up, interrupting their busy lives to ask them about what has become an increasingly ugly election season. Most people don't want to talk about it, which I can totally respect, and more often than not, these people are quite polite but firm about not wishing to continue their phone conversation with me. Doesn't really hurt my feelings...eh, okay, maybe just a little. As long as they are polite, I don't feel too bad.

And then there are the not-so-polite ones. The ones who, rather than tell me that they simply don't want to talk to me, would rather say rude things. Like a certain young fellow I had the luck of calling tonight.

A.L., as I will call him, is an apparently lovely young man who lives in Cornelius and has a healthy vocabulary and an incredibly polite conversational manner. Upon hearing the name "Obama" pass my lips this evening, he responded by yelling into the phone: "F*ck you, I'm not voting for that n*gg*r." He then punctuated his response by hanging up on me.

Word to the wise, A.L. and others with your impeccable manners: I, like other phone bankers, do not have a random number machine dialing the phone numbers for me. I have a sheet of paper, obtained from the registrar of voters, that gives me details about you: your name, your age, your political affiliation, your phone number. And your address. Yeah, your address. And guess what - chances are, your friendly phone banker doesn't live all that far away from you. As luck would have it, I live within 3 miles of our upstanding young citizen A.L. Luckily for him, I am far more bitchy and antagonistic on the computer than I am in real life, so I will just chalk up our encounter and his amazingly bigoted insult to be an interesting anecdote to share on my blog and and at cocktail parties in the future. A different person, however, might not be on such an even-keel.

*sigh* When did manners fall so far out of fashion? Darn that rock n'roll!!!