Monday, January 14, 2013

Election day duty driver

On my kibbutz, like many others, there exists the function called 'duty driver'. This means that every day during the week, a kibbutz member takes a large car and drives people from the kibbutz to the nearest town then picks people up returning by train or by bus from the town to the kibbutz. The hours are from 5-10pm, after work, and it's a voluntary - meaning unpaid - job. 

In the old days, "everybody used to take a turn at doing everything" - there would be a rota for working on Saturday, a rota for working in the dining room in the evenings, a rota for guard duty, a rota for duty driver, etc. Over the years, most of these rotas have disappeared and the only ones left are duty driver and guard duty. Once men used to do both, but now they do either one or the other. I opted for duty driver as it gives me some sense of social reward (the hours are better too).

In the past few years, more and more kibbutz members have acquired their own form of transport and so the number of people who take advantage of the duty driver has steadily decreased. In turn, the scope of the duty driver has been reduced, meaning that regular journeys are made between 5-7:30pm, after which the driver sits at home and waits for people to telephone.

The last time that a general election was held in Israel was four years ago, on a rainy Tuesday in January. People don't work on the day elections are held, ostensibly to allow them to travel to wherever they have to be in order to vote, but for most people it is just a day off (shops are closed but public transport is available). As it happened, I was duty driver that day: along with the holiday and the rain, I don't think I gave anybody a lift. I simply drove through the empty and wet streets of Bet Shemesh.

There will be a general election again next Tuesday, and although it doesn't look like rain (we had enough last week), once again I will be duty driver on election day. Coincidence or favouritism? What are the chances of being duty driver on consecutive election days?

At first, I thought that it was a strange coincidence (well, all coincidences are strange by definition), but then I realised that the odds of this happening are far from astronomical. As I do this duty once every two months, there are about 45 people on the rota and so the probability of being duty driver on any given day is thus 1 in 45. As there is no connection between the rota from four years ago and the current rota, the two probabilities should be multiplied together meaning that there is a 1 in 2025 chance of being duty driver for two consecutive election days. 

Better odds of being duty driver on election day than winning the national lottery.

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