The message hit my pager about midnight. I was watching the 2000 presidential election returns on my neighbor’s TV. (I didn’t own a TV; I hate those things). The men with the weird toupees who feed television “news” to the nation had called Florida for Al Gore. Then for George Bush. That’s when my pager went off: “don’t call DC, don’t call headquarters, get next plane to West Palm Beach airport. immediately. don’t call us. rent car, go to Hilton.”

I had never seen a page quite like that and don’t believe I ever will again. I looked at the pager, then at the TV, where confounded anchors were stammering about Florida, then back at the pager. Then I put the pager down, picked up the phone, and booked the next flight to West Palm Beach. Before the sun was up I was on my way.

The place I was leaving was Stamford, Connecticut, where I was running a pilot organizing project for the AFL-CIO. When you work as national staff for either the AFL-CIO or one of its member unions, you can expect to periodically get “pulled” from whatever merely urgent thing you are doing to some other thing that is actually dire. The practice can be overused by people buried in Washington offices who are convinced that everything on their desk is of utmost importance and who have forgotten how disruptive it is to real organizing of flesh-and-blood workers. But in this case, there wasn’t anything more important anywhere, the presidential election was on the line.