Dear City Council Candidates-

I know this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I am asking this sincerely.

Please go away.

You may think from the tone of this blog that I don’t like politicians.  That’s not, strictly speaking, true.  I don’t like politicians and their employees/interns/canvassers who don’t listen or read.  I don’t like people who don’t listen no matter what it is that they do for a living, actually, but this post is specific to politicians.

I am not so naive as to think that politicians actually listen to, well, anyone, but on an individual person to person level, I get really irritated when they do things like ignore the NO SOLICITING sign on our door and harass us anyway.

Geoff and I work weird hours.  This means that if we’re home during the day, we’re more than likely sleeping or knee deep in laundry or cleaning or something else equally fun.  That means that if you ignore the NO SOLICITING sign and ring the doorbell one of a few things will happen.

1) The dogs will go nuts.  If we’re sleeping this is unpleasant.  If we’re on a ladder or carrying something heavy, this is worse.

2) We have to extricate ourselves from whatever we’re doing and find our way to the door.

3) We have to fend off Scratch and keep him from trying to run out the door or climb one of us like a tree.  Or both.

This makes us significantly less inclined to want to talk to you.  We have to do this for package deliveries often enough.  We really don’t want to do this for door knockers.  This is extra bad if we’ve already got a sign in our window supporting your candidate.  That should mean that we don’t have to talk to you OR to the people from your opponent.

So, here’s how this is going to work.  If you ignore the sign and bother us, you automatically lose our vote.  If you follow up with mail or stuff illegally shoved through our mail slot, we’ll tell our friends about how we’re not voting for you and how they shouldn’t either.  If you go so far as to add us to your robo-calling list or email spam list?  We’ll start listing you here as someone who doesn’t know how to run a campaign and who clearly doesn’t give a damn about their potential constituents.

That may not sound like a big deal, but in a hotly contested community race it actually does matter.  So, listen and read the signs, you never know who might be paying attention.

~Kelly