So technology was supposed to make our lives easier?

I had the pleasure of interning on the Hill in a Senate office during my sophomore year of college. September 11th had occurred the previous year, and the war on Iraq resolution was being debated. From afternoons spent in the mail room, I saw first hand the effect of the anthrax situation. The mail we received had been sent weeks, if not a month or two, before. Among my other responsibilities was sorting through faxes and e-mails, picking out ones that were "form letters" and separating them from actual constituent correspondence. Until you've personally spent hours of your day at such a task, there is no way to understand the sheer mass of correspondence a Senate office receives daily. My particular office chose to respond to all letters by snail mail, regardless of the form they originated in.

After I had been there a few months, I got "adopted" b a few of the LCs, which bumped me from mail room duty to drafting responses to constituent letters. I went in three days a week, and most days I would find e-mails in my in-folder that were at least 2 weeks old. By the time I got through with them and the LC revised them, I imagine a month would pass before a response was even ready to be mailed. I'm not sure whether my office was particularly bad at staying on top of correspondence, but if Dennis Johnson was right in his book, Congress Online, falling behind in mail is a fairly common problem on the Hill.

With more and more correspondence coming in electronically, I don't blame Congress for wanting to use filtering systems, so that they can give their interns and staff assistants tasks other than sorting through mail and given them substantial work. And more importantly, of course, so that their office can run more efficiently. However I, like Johnson, am a bit concerned that leaving the responsibility to technology is just asking for trouble. EchoMail, a system set up to automatically reply to e-mails based on keywords, may be efficient, but a couple of screw ups getting reported in the news, and good luck getting reelected.

I get MoveOn's e-mails, and I've seen the formats they provide in order to launch a cyber protest at a Congressman with whom they disagree. Unfortunately for Hill staffers, that's always going to be a problem with or without e-mail. E-mail just makes it that much easier for the young professional stuck in front of a computer all day to get involved. Good for democracy, bad for overworked, underpaid Hill staff.