April 9, 2010

Today, I worked my first day at Congressman John Tierney's (D-MA) local office. I worked from 9:00-10:45 and 3:00-6:00 (I had class from 11:09-2:15).

I was first introduced around the office and met almost everyone who works there (some of them were not in the office at the time because they were with Tierney in Amesbury, where he was meeting with some local companies). It struck me that there was probably only one male working there out of the dozen or so people who do. Here's a list of what I did that day:

• At the office, they have dozens of daily newspapers from the towns in his Congressional District. I sat down and underlined/highlighted about 4-5 newspapers with articles that pertained to the Federal Government becoming involved. All of the articles I highlighted (and continued to copy and store in a folder) had to do with the March floods that our county had. FEMA and other organizations were coming to Essex County to help give out supplies.
• I then was assigned to filing numerous the complaints and requests that Tierney's office had in 2008 in alphabetic order. I put them into boxes (3 in total) so that they could move the files to storage downstairs and proceed to put the 2009 complaints and requests in the same place where the 2008 ones used to be (so that they are easier to access). I finished this at 10:45 (A-Z) and then went to school
•  I got back around 3:00 PM, and they let me park in their parking lot so I didn't have to pay to park on the street. I then started to alphabetically order the cases on an Excel Spreadsheet. I had to do every single one of them (I only had time for A-C) and include both their first and last names, the Issue (ie. IRS or Immigration), and the date the case was closed (the last time somebody worked on it). I worked on that for the final 3 or so hours.

I also met Congressman Tierney briefly. He grew up in Salem and was a much bigger person than I'd have expected. He was nice, as I really didn't expect him to take even a few seconds out of his daily life (he had a schedule from 7:30 AM until 10 PM that day) to converse with an intern. 

The people also vented from time to time about the obviously inept constituents that called up from time to time. They'd get very angry for no apparent reason on the phone. Obviously, tensions do run high, but for a lot of the conversations, there was no point in them complaining so much about random stuff. I can't discuss the specifics, but there were some interesting things going on that I've obviously never seen.