Sleep Versus Call Time: A Comparison

It's been hours. You don't even know what time it is. Your eyes are stinging and your vision is blurred. Your partner is rocking to herself in the corner with an alarming, vacant expression. There's been a lot of crying, some of it from yourself. And all you can think of is why the little brat won't just DO IT already.

I am talking, of course, about getting candidates to do call time.

For the (mercifully) uninitiated, call time is the foundation of all political campaigns. For various reasons we require campaigns to be funded by charitable contributions, and the only reliable way to get enough of those is for the candidate to sit in a room and call a bunch of people until they send money. It's really simple and almost effortless. So of course candidates won't do it. Ever. Every manager has had to yell at her candidate to get back to fucking call time. Even Barack Obama's manger did it. I guarantee you.

So as you might imagine, this has a lot of parallels with that time-honored, torturous ritual of getting your infant to go to goddamned sleep. I'd say they're identical, except that it's actually easier to get a recalcitrant, angry, shrieking baby to sleep than it is to get your average candidate into call time. After all, the baby is EVENTUALLY going to pass out in total exhaustion. He may not do it right now. He may not do it before YOU pass out in total exhaustion. But it's going to happen. Not so much for call time, even though the candidates will absolutely, 100% lose, do not pass Go, do not start "grassroots campaign" lose, unless they pick up the stupid phone and make the stupid calls.

With that in mind here is a comparison of the many ways candidates avoid call time and young children avoid sleep. All of the tactics in either column have been reliably confirmed to me or experienced by myself:

Candidate Dodging Call Time	Baby Dodging Sleep
Scream like an angry baby	Scream like an angry candidate
Hide under the table	Hide under the table
Take interns out for coffee	Giggle and play quietly showing no outward signs of fatigue
Fake phone calls	Fake being asleep
Flee the country	Flee the room
Start fights	Punch parent in windpipe/claw at eyes
Stick hands in pants to avoid touching phone	Take giant shit
Demand to look at questionnaire drafts/ads/press release copy over and over	Demand same book be read over and over
Wear manager down into insane nervous wreck	Wear parent down into insane nervous wreck