A young New York Times freelancer, Natasha Lennard, served as a decoy—one of 200 or so—in last night’s annual New York City government-sponsored, volunteer-run homeless survey. This survey, you can imagine, is to judge the number of homeless people who are living outside of shelter in the winter. And these decoys, quite obviously, are used as a measure of coverage and penetration of the actual surveying. This census may have any number of methodology or practice (or policy interpretation!) problems, but the decoy system idea does not seem to me to be among them.

She wrote about the decoy experience this morning. In response, Gawker reporter John Cook wrote: “Two-hundred fake homeless people did this last night, to make sure the census was working, because how can we know how many real homeless people there are if we don’t know how many grad students there are pretending to be homeless? We wonder how much more accurate the census would have been if those 200 people had spent the night looking for homeless people.”

We do? Who does he think was looking for homeless people—no one? Or maybe… the volunteer census-takers who did find this particular decoy? Who were among hundreds of other tightly-organized people conducting this census? Would he prefer the government run a survey without at least some measure of the outcome?

For people who are young and/or shy to any degree—let’s take, for example, two adorable young women, actually NYU hotel management majors—confronting the taboo of speaking to strangers (some a bit delusional, some drunk, some “scary”) on the street and in subways at 3 a.m. and engaging homeless or possibly-homeless people instead of stepping over them is maybe the most difficult thing they’ll do all year.

In a grid that measured just one avenue block wide by four streets high, both above-ground and in the subway, they participated in interviews with nearly 50 people, about 20-25% of whom self-identified as homeless, and 0% of whom were decoys. Fortunately the girls didn’t have any classes today until 12:30 p.m., so when they got home at 4:30 a.m. after thoroughly scouring their turf, at least they got a halfway decent late morning’s sleep.

A majority of people out at that hour—and this is not a generalization—do not speak English at all or well, do not welcome intrusion and/or are in an altered chemical state.

“It’s ironic,” said one of those girls, Angela, while waiting for her friend to pee in the only open business on the territory, a strip club formerly named The Paradise, “that all I can think about is my comfy bed.” Her friend had never been in a strip club before but it was surely a broadening experience for her. For one thing, there was a man getting a lapdance from two women. For another, there was also a man in the bathroom, who told her it was the women’s room, but it actually wasn’t.

“We don’t usually let women in, but you’re pretty,” the bouncer told her.

This was not long after they had introduced themselves to yet another man on a corner. He had a huge beard and huger parka. He said that he was out on the streets performing a census of his very own. He was, he said, “documenting the last days of America.”