Through the Eyes of a Wombat

Well, as you know I've been working at the Electoral Commission the past three weeks. Things are going very well, and I'm one of the few asked to stay back for an extra week for 'distribution of preferences', a complicated mathematical problem made much much easier by moving 92,000 individual votes around the table. They needed only people who had done this before, as it confuses some people... well, I haven't done it before, but they seem to think that I'm a fast learner. (Wombats don't have opposable thumbs, but so far I've been able to hide this fact by the use of rubber thimbles.)
The 20 or so people, like me, employed as temporary scrutineers to count everyone's vote would, of course, overcrowd the little AEC office if we stayed in there, so somehow it was arranged that we took over the large empty room directly upstairs - a disused nightclub.Given, also, that we work on a temporary basis, we have time sheets to note times we start and stop work, take lunch, et cetera. Being government paperwork, they are quite detailed, including a breakdown by percentage of how much time per day each person spends on each task. John, the fellow downstairs who manages employee pay is very insistent that we fill in our percentages 'exactly'. Well, he wanted precise, so our table decided that 47.832% was more precise than 50%, so our percentages were all to three decimal places.John has an amazing lack of a sense of humour and was overheard complaining of "sorting out the mess those peasants upstairs made". Peasants, eh? Well, given the spirit in which the comment was made, we could complain, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun...Our timesheet folder no longer says "Temporary Scrutineers' Time Sheets", but "Peasants' Time Sheets", the covering sheet is no longer addressed to "Everybody," but to "Peasants". Ahh, the fun you can have with a printer and a photocopier...People are gradually starting to notice, though I'm sure most people are unsure as to the origins... though around midday Friday some flowers turned up, from the husband of one of the scrutineers, addressed 'To the hardest working peasant of them all'...