Not every country takes their census the same way. Yes, there are other ways besides the good old American way!
Seriously, there have to be.
My close personal bud Padre Mickey and his wife The Lovely Mona were counted in the Panamá census on Sunday May 16. The entire county of a little more than three million people is required by law to be in their homes. You can be fined or arrested for being out on the street. Obviously, Panamá does not have legions of freedom lovin' gun toters, because I think the Tea Partiers would have mass aneurysms if we conducted the Census this way in the States.
Unlike the U.S. Census, which asks about ten questions total, there are ten pages and 54 questions, and they get really specific. They wanna know about your stuff, from toilets to teevees, from cars to computers. If every census taker could ask about 100 people to fill this thing out, and that seems like a high estimate to me, they would still need to hire between 30,000 and 40,000 people for that Sunday to be enumerators.
Then you have all that paperwork to go through, so another small army of clerks have to be hired to get this stuff into usable form. I, of course, now have some experience at massive paper shuffling, but I'm not willing to travel out of the county to take this gig.
Perdón. Lo siento, pero no lo siento mucho.
