#19 Shreveport

Left the shelter this morning late. Late. Just wonderful. They rescue me from the CLS, and I am late. To compound my transgression, there is suddenly massive amounts of traffic backing up back to east nowhere. I am in east nowhere. Notice that I have a message on my cell phone. Uh oh.......Get the message. More good news. Boss wants to make sure he reaches me before I left the shelter. Not quite. Sigh.

Boss wants to make sure that I have packed for an overnight, because we are going to Shreveport. Just he and me. Yeah, I know that's grammatically incorrect, but it sounded cool didn't it? SIgh sigh sigh. I am not packed, I did not get the message in time and I am late, stuck in traffic, one third of the way into headquarters. Great start to a great morning.

Turn around, call Boss, grovel at 50 mph in a 35 mph zone, roaring back at warp speed to the shelter. Squeal into the church parking lot looking like a flufffy blond Popeye Doyle. This sucks. I pack at the speed of light, run back to the car, well actually it is a Ford Explorer the size of my living room. I have dubbed it "The Moose". Leap into Moosie, and I am about to screech out of there when I remember that I forgot my jammies. That would have been an unfortunate intro to my new employer. Jumped back out, bailed back in, got the jammies and tore back to the car. Drove into Headquarters like a bat out of hell. Or at least like a dingbat out of California. Yikes!

I was out of breath and way late. Boss didn't even look up. Just sat me down at my new desk, actually a six foot foldable table that I shared with him and whomever chose to sit across from me that day. Had to steal one of the "good" chairs every day until I finally marked one with blue tape bearing my name, the words, "my chair", and a picture of the skull and crossbones on it. Good chairs were solid plastic and cream colored. Bad chairs were flimsy plastic and brown. It was a pecking order thing. I own a flock of chickens at home, so I know from pecking orders. I made sure to grab only the good chairs. guessing that it might make me one of the head chickens.

In any case, Boss man right away, started to give me things to do. He called it debriefing. I called it a lot of notes. It was: call this guy, ask this thing, find out this, find out that, go here and coordinate those etc...etc..etc... There were about twenty things on the list. It took me about an hour to do them, and get it all on paper, answers printed out using my laptop. I gave Boss the printout notes of the finished tasks, and he just looked at me and laughed. Big Daddy came over, and Boss gave him the list, and then Daddy laughed. I couldn't figure out what was so funny. Turns out what was so funny was that I finished a list of to do's in an hour that had in the past taken others days to get through. I figured they must have been forced to work with some new ARC rule that required their basic intelligence to be tied behind their backs or something.

Somehow, in this situation, I became my previously unknown super-hero alter ego: LOGICAL WOMAN. Around here, I appeared to come from another planet. that worked for me. Luckily, it worked For Boss and Daddy too. Boss and I hung out for a few hours solving ARC puzzles, and finally hit the road to Shreveport. It was going to be a five hour drive. We got over the bridge in about forty minutes, and stopped to get directions. I took the opportunity to obtain some pork rinds, pralines and a pecan pie. I love weird foods. Boss was horrified. Off we went, into the next town. We noticed that we needed gas.

Problem number one: There was no gas. Anywhere. The electricity was out, and the pumps were down and there was no gas to be had. Station after station was either locked up completely, or had plastic bags over their nozzles, and were making hay selling pork rinds to tourists like myself. Crud! Around we turned and back we went, over the bridge and back into Baton Rouge until we found a gas station that had gas. How the heck did we not notice that virtually no one had any gas? Turned out that many in Baton Rouge had no gas either. We just hadn't noticed before, because the station near Headquarters always had gas. SIlly us. 40 minutes later, we were back over the bridge and on our way. An hour and a half detour. Hate it when that happens. Deja vu of this morning all over again.

Drove and talked and drove and drove some more. Boss hit the exhaustion wall, and I took the wheel. I am from Southern California. With me driving, we averaged 85 to 90 on the almost empty roads. I ignored Boss' white knuckles, and we made up the time that we had lost. Hey! I said I was from L.A. Cars, ya know? Got to Shreveport in chop chop time.

The Shreveport ARC chapter was in the middle of a run down residential area. I was later to notice that much of Shreveport was somewhat run down. I also noticed that there was a church of some kind on virtually every corner. Some streets had two churches within a couple of hundred feet of each other. They all had names like: "The Blood of the Lamb and the Righteous Light Baptist Church". This did not bode well to my way of thinking. Not because I am half Jewish, hey, the other half were a bunch of Unitarian ministers, but because of something that I have noticed. What I have noticed has happened so frequently, that I have made up a rule for it. I like to call this little rule, "The Rule of Devoutness". "The Rule of Devoutness" holds that anyone publicly making the declaration, "I am a Christian", does so only when it is right before or right after, they have done, or are going to do something absolutely despicable. Things like throwing a five year old out of a preschool because his mama's a stripper. Often, it involves something so un-christlike, that it makes your head spin. This berg had the statistical propensity to hold myriad of these kind of folks.

We went through the office meeting, "our people". Technically, these guys worked for our department. In actuality, because of the lack of staffing and leadership from Headquarters, many of the outlying chapters had created their own little feifdoms, picking and choosing the rules and regulations that suited them, ignoring the ones that didn't. This was one of those.

At first glance, They were a swell group. "John", the short, wiry, mixed asian leader from San Francisco was upbeat, friendly, cheerful, and decidedly in charge. It was his way or the highway. "Barney", was the warehouse/not a warehouse manager. We weren't allowed to call the warehouse a warehouse for some bizarre reason, the locals didn't want a warehouse in their neighborhood. Felt it ran the area down. The area couldn't get any more down. Funny idea, as though not calling it what it is would make it into something else. Gotta love that way of thinking. In fact, from here on out, you can call me a 22 year old. Is it working yet?

Barney was an interesting specimen. He couldn't figure out for the life of him how to create a flow chart so that he could order supplies ahead of need. Instead, he would rush out to the store using a credit card to make "emergency" purchases, which consisted of anything the shelters might need on that given day. He would then rush back and get reimbursed by the chapter. He did this single dang day mind you. Unfortunately, this was totally against policy, and the chapter was going to be oh so surprised when National refuses to reimburse them. Barney was doing this for the benefit of thousands of clients currently housed in arenas and other sites across the area. Barney was also financially screwing the ARC and his chapter because of his own laziness.

When I pointed out that his method was not cost effective, as we had already contracted for and stored in our own ARC warehouses, many of the things that he was paying top dollar for at the local WalMart, he just refused to get it. His statement?: "Well...like how could we order things like bananas? I mean, bananas are perishable and we need them right away?" Interesting that a total monkey would use bananas in an analogy. I suggested to ol' "Barn", that bananas came from Costa Rica, a far toss from the Shreveport WalMart, and somehow that WalMart managed to order bananas in advance all the way from Costa Rica so that he could rush out every day and buy them. Hmmmm.... One would have thought that he might have seen the irony, but not so. Instead, I, who knows virtually nothing about creating an ordering type of flow chart, but do possess an IQ higher than room temperature, spent the next half hour drawing out and explaining how invoicing and projecting need works. Sigh.

Later that day, Barney was faithfully filling out invoices, and then not sending them out and rushing back to WalMart. When caught in the act, he said that he didn't trust that my system would work, but knew that going out and buying the damn bananas worked just fine. It turned out that " Barney" was unclear that I was his boss, and that my instruction was not a suggestion, but a direct order, no matter how politely I had put it to him. In this feifdom, he thought that "John" was king, and Boss-man and I were just a couple of know-nothings from Headquarters. Well we may have been a couple of know-nothings, but as things stood, we were the know-nothings in charge of "Barney", "John", and the whole Shreveport chapter. Our faithful employees. It was going to be a long trip.

Boss and I then sat in on a meeting between the head of the Chapter and the ARC volunteer heads that we were there to supervise. The chapter head was a guy named "Roman". A tall powerful looking man of fifty-something, with a ready grin, a good ol' boy aura and a mostly full head of dyed red hair. In this area of the state, This guy was the ARC god. Unfortunately, he was not a kind, caring and gentle god. Midway through the meeting, in discussing the dissatisfaction with our operation that some clients were voicing, the words, spoken in exasperation: "These people are getting free money!" slithered out of his mouth. No one said anything to counter him, and several actually agreed. Ok, time to step up to the plate....again. I took a deep breath, as it was a David and Goliath moment. Shreveport was the longtime home of the Grand Dragon/Moron of the Ku Kux Klan. The town was pretty much segregated by unspoken agreement. From what we had seen, blacks and whites did not mix in this part of the country. Although the area was 70% black, whites were owners and blacks were not. Things were not equal by a long shot, but this was just the way it was around here. Nobody planned on changing the status quo anytime soon.

I took that breath, and in the gentlest way possible said, "excuse me "Roman", but "these people", are our clients, and we are here to serve them." You could have heard a pin drop, and that was in a room that had wall to wall carpeting. He turned to me and started to rant about how I just got here and I don't know all of the things that had happened, and I didn't understand the culture and all of the good things that his chapter had done for "these people". When he was done and out of breath, and in a high state of disgust and anger with yours truly, I gently but firmly reiterated, "I am sure you have done many good works, and accomplished a lot. I am sure that you are frustrated and feel at times that your job is thankless, none the less, "these people" are still our clients, and we are here to serve them as best we can." No one stood behind what I had just said. Not one of them said a word in support. Not even my own Boss. I think he was still too shocked at me correcting an apparent racist in charge in the middle of Klan country, in front of the whole group. I was shocked that "John" the asian guy didn't say something or even catch it, but then he had to work with this joker.

The meeting adjourned soon after with nothing of substance decided as far as I could tell. Next on the agenda, Dinner! About time. Went in a mule train to some restaurant, that turned out to be in a casino. Loud as a brass band in there. It was a buffet of every variety of heavy greasy southern chow that you could ever dream up. It was great. The piles of boiled shrimp alone were worth it. I did notice, that I was one of the only ones to eat anything green. Wonder what the heart attack rate is outside of Southern California?

FInished dinner, and dragged ourselves to the hotel. Hotel. Let me just savor that for a wee moment. A Bed! Ahhhh. A BATH! Whoopie!!!! Got our room keys, and said our goodnights. Knew it was too good to be true. There was a knock on the door. Turns out that Boss' room already had occupants. A couple of evacuees who had lied and said that they were Red Cross in order to get a free Room. They would be summarily turned out and charged to boot the next morning, but for tonight, Boss was commandeering my room. Drat! I was to move into the extra bed in "Dora's" room across the hall.

"Dora" was a coordinator in the Shreveport office. She was small and sturdy with jaw length straight brown hair and soft brown eyes. She'd married young and had three kids, one of whom was in the military. "Dora" was really sweet, she came from Kentucky and was now stuck with me. She was actually pretty gracious about it, although I could tell that it wasn't her first choice.

She did all of her bathroom stuff, and then went to bed. We talked for quite a while. Turned out that she was a very devout christian, and her son had gone off and married some Jewish girl. No one was happy about it. She was sure I would understand. Just as she was about to launch into that subject, I let her know that I was one of the tribe. She backpedaled as quick as her mouth would carry her and we ended up talking a lot more. In the end, it felt as though I might have made at least a small inroad into the Kentucky preconception of "my people", as we shared some mutual understanding, and she seemed to relax about it at last.

Odd. I have never before actually felt Jewish. My father is Jewish, but my mother is decidedly not. I wasn't raised in any faith, but I identify myself by who my enemies are, and if this was 1939 and the trains were leaving, chances are I wouldn't have been left behind because I was only half Jewish, or, I didn't look Jewish. What do you think?

Finally, I went to collapse in the bathtub. It felt so good that I fell asleep in the water. Lucky I didn't drown I guess. When I finally extracted my now prunish self from the water, dressed and came out, the lights were out and "Dora" was sawing logs. I sat up for a bit in the dark with the computer, but finally, even I passed out.