Census Calls Inundate Rochester College Student 10:46 A.m. ET (1546 GMT) March 23, 2000 NEW YORK  A telephone glitch has turned Kathi Grobsmith into a reluctant expert on the census.

The Rochester, New York, college student is receiving hundreds of calls a day from people across the nation seeking answers or airing complaints about the census.

The volume of calls has gotten so bad that her answering machine message begs people not to leave obscenity-filled, census-related messages. Her line is so busy that her friends can't get through and she can rarely make calls herself.

Phone company officials tell her it's not their fault. Census officials say they're working on the problem.

In the meantime, Grobsmith says she's become adept at answering census questions. She joked to a census employee that they'll owe her a paycheck for handling all those calls

http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/032300/census.sml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 23, 2000