So a couple days ago I get an email from the Obama campaign asking for volunteers to call
Indiana and encourage people to register to vote. I go to the website
and as usual they've posted the Top 10 Callers. They're all way past
whatever I'll ever be able to manage, mostly around 400, 500, with one
close to breaking 1000. But at the top of the list is this woman
Patricia Gold, who's already credited with 5,172 calls. The email just went out and she's already called 5,172 people! How is this possible? I mean, just at a physical level, given that time can't be slowed down or sped up except at unsurvivable velocities, how could one person do this?

I'm
puzzling over this when I start to realize: this "Patricia Gold" sounds
familiar. Like maybe I've seen her on a list like this before. So I go
to an old bookmark and sure enough, there she is: leading the "Invite
volunteers to travel to Indiana to register new voters" call list at
1796, while slow, pathetic, underachieving Stanley Graham drags in at
second with only 350.

At this point I know I have to learn more
about this woman—plus it's always so much more fun to play Google than
to do any actual work—so I start hunting down past 10 Top Caller lists.
Yep. Mississippi: Patricia Gold, 2203 calls, double the second-place
Barbara Shotwell. Wyoming: Patricia Gold, 1118 calls, half again as
much as Denis Neba. Texas: Patricia Gold, this time in a squeaker, 2562
over Claudia Sutton's 2420. Northern states, Southern states, big
states, small states, Patricia carries them all.

(Strangely,
though, she's not on the Top 10 at all for Pennsylvania. Is
this because she knew it was a state she couldn't win and diverted her
resources elsewhere? Or could it be that she's already in
Pennsylvania, walking around canvassing door-to-door while she's on her
cell phone to Indiana? At this point, nothing about Patricia Gold would
shock me.)

My first thought is, this has to be a fake. A
campaign strategist decided they need a name on top of every list with
an absurd number of calls to stir up volunteers' competitive instincts,
and some focus group reported that "Patricia Gold" was the perfect
Barackist name. Not too odd, not too generic, doesn't betray any
particular generational affiliation (á la "McKenzie" or "Madge"), a
whiff of Jewishness to appeal to the educated left-wing but not so
indisputably Jewish that gentile voters feel alienated.

But then
I think, no way. How devastating would it be to the real volunteers if
some Fox reporter or Clinton snoop discovered that the call lists were
gimmicked? (And wouldn't I feel stupid if I were the one who kicked off
the investigation?) No, Patricia Gold must exist. Some actual woman out
there has really, truly (unless she has a deeply codependent spouse and
children making calls in her name) racked up at least 10,289
Obama-calls to Indiana, Mississippi and Wyoming, states where the
campaign started just a month ago.

The mathematics horrify me:
over 2500 a week, 360 a day, 30 an hour (they tell you only to call
between 9 AM and 9 PM). That's a call every two minutes. A lot of those
will be 30-second messages on voice mail, but there are also plenty of
people who like to talk, and surely Patricia Gold is not one to shy
away from an energetic plea to an undecided or a crackling exchange
with a Clintonite.

But that's where my Googling hits the wall.
My big questions remain unanswered. Who is this woman? What does she
do? And more important, what will the poor thing do after the election is over?