That's what I get for being early

Showed up at my polling place at 6:50 a.m. this morning. I thought maybe I would spend some time in line. But I didn't expect the poll workers to be utterly unprepared.

I walked in there behind two women, who were really the first voters. We found the poll workers -- all working class women in their 20s and 30s -- sitting around the school cafeteria chitchatting. Nothing was set up. Seems the poll workers were under the impression that the polls opened at 8, not 7 a.m.

Well, I was prepared to wait. But the women in front of me, and the people who came in just behind us, had many comments. That got very middle-class upper-achiever about it, fretting that if they were organizing it -- or even just helping -- this would never happen. I could tell that these were a bunch of high-powered office workers, managers and the like; it was all they could do to keep from jumping in and setting up the voting booths themselves.

It didn't really take the poll workers too long to get it straightened out. I was handed my ballot at 7:24 a.m. Of course it was imcomplete, and I had to ask for the rest of it -- twice -- when I discovered the state and local ballot propositions were not on the ballot sheets I was given. In any case, I got out of there ten minutes later. Not that big a deal, really. There were about 40 people in line at that point, by the way.