Just got home,
It was better than I expected, it was worse than I expected.
To give you some perspective, I expected 1,000 people, and we got around 10,000
The day started off well, with people rather cheery and polite as we instructed them how to line up. People kept it together as we sent them back to the overflow room. When, late in the afternoon we were only getting to the people that had signed in 20-30 minutes after sign ins started people started to get ugly. We had an attempted rush on the door when one of the Senators declared that there were over 30 empty seats in the room. (a bit of an exaggeration, we were bringing people over from overflow as seats opened up.
This was about the time that suspicion set in, and i became "the man" I was then the guy trying to mislead them into complacency as I tried to explain the system that we were using to make sure that people would be in the room when their name was called. We would still get the odd person come up and sincerely thank us for our work, but the crowd was getting ugly.
I finally managed to talk down the mob, and get them to return to the overflow. We continued registering on into the night, with more and more people coming as they got off of work. After having spent the entire morning trying to assure people that we were not trying to squelch them, the co-chairs had us close off registration at 9pm last night, in front of a 200 person line.
The crowd immediately erupted, and as minority party senators realized what was going on, the proceedings ground to a halt, and the people inside the room erupted. One minority party member went out and assured the crowd that they would get to speak, to many cheers. However we were at the moment under the rule of the co-chairs and could only do as they instructed us. Leaving us in a position where people had been told by a Senator that they could register, while we had not been instructed to register anyone. My co-workers in the overflow room were completely in the dark as to what was going on at the door to the hearing room, and as things started to boil over, I headed over and did my best to give people frank answers to calm them down. Needless to say this was the worst part of the night, a door panel got kicked in, there was chanting and anger. Our staff was briefly put into emergency mode.
The people who had been turned away ended up congregating in the rotunda of the capitol, where they eventually camped out overnight. Around midnight the people who were testifying had signed up at about noon. Others continued to trickle into the hearing room and testify until 3:00 AM, when the committee adjourned the hearing while there were still people who were waiting to testify, something i've never seen happen, and had spent most of the day assuring suspicious people wouldn't happen.
The members of the minority party as a reaction to this decided to hold an impromptu listening session where they would stay and continue to listen to those who wished to testify. They maintained the rules of 2 minutes per person, and had us staff that session for them, we quickly signed up an additonal 150-200 people This lasted all night, until 8:30 this morning, when they had to leave the room that they were using due to it having a scheduled event, at which point they recessed and moved to an assembly room. This was also shortly after the capitol doors unlocked for the morning, allowing in an entire new stream of people who wished to testify. By about 10:00 am we had a line back up to around 200 people waiting to testify. I kept working the room, and ran a few more errands before heading home.
here's a relevant news article to those interested:
http://www.channel3000.com/politics/26881932/detail.htmlAlso, if anyone has any questions they'd like to ask of "the man" in the government, ask away.
Author
Topic: Work Tomorrow (Wisconsin Protest) (Read 37012 times)