May 5, 2010

This week, I worked at John Tierney's office on Tuesday and Wednesday. I worked about 5 hours each day.

I did the same thing essentially each day. Though it was still a bit boring, it's a bit better than what I was doing before (filing closed cases) because I got to go on the Internet and sometimes use the phone. At first, I needed to update all of the information for all of the police and fire department chiefs' contact information on a sheet of paper. This ended up being about 16 pages long, with about 3 towns per page more or less.

Then, Claudia (the secretary) had me cross reference the information (including phone, fax, email, address, and name) with those in their database, which had last been updated in early September of 2009. Their database allows them to send out standardized letters to each of the chiefs without having to personalize them themselves. The computer does it for them, so we had to make sure that all of the contact information was correct. On almost every one of them, there was something to change. Whether it be the way we address them (Chief _______) or the phone number, things changed in almost all of the chiefs contacts.

A lot of towns had also had elections recently, since September, and chosen new fire chiefs or police chiefs. So, if that was the case, I would look up the old fire or police chief and replace their name with the new one, and make sure all of the contact information was up to date.

If there was an irregularity, for example if I couldn't find the address or email address of the chief on the police department's website, I called the police department to ask for it. I probably made at least a dozen calls to various police and fire departments asking for email addresses. It was the first time I had been asked to call someone representing John Tierney's office.

The man who asked for the information said he needed it updated because the Congressman is about to send out new "grants and information" to each of the fire and police departments, so he needs to have some way to contact the heads of those departments.

They're all really nice at the office, and they even made me a birthday card (May 3rd) with each of them writing a little note appreciating my work. I certainly learn a lot about how a local Congressman's office functions.

Though I haven't seen Congressman Tierney since before April break personally, I have been able to pay attention to how things work in the office and its atmosphere. Everyone there is much more human than I expected, to be honest. I knew I was going to work for part of the bureaucracy, so I expected essentially hardcore machines to be hammering out facts, statistics, legislation, and information. However, in reality, they are based around talking and dealing with the constituents and their cases, so emotions, both good and bad, certainly can come out. Everyone there has unique personalities, and the people are much more entertaining and talkative than I expected them to be towards an intern.

Oh, and the other day, I got to go into the Congressman's office for the first time. He wasn't there, and I was just shredding paper, but it was an awesome experience for an aspiring politician. I wrote down, with the Secretary's permission, almost all of the books he had in his office so that I could eventually buy them and read them. There were some very interesting ones!