Early morning

Even though most of the operation here in Baton Rouge is winding down, some departments are still quite active. Client Services, which is responsible for assessing damage and issuing relief funds, has been recruiting more volunteers for weeks. Not surprisingly, few folks started their time here just before Thanksgiving. Now that we are between holidays, the volunteers are pouring in.

Yesterday, over 100 new people flooded into headquarters late in the day. They just kept arriving and arriving, overwhelming the skeleton crew who try to find hotel rooms. Around 6pm, it was decided that a shelter would be set up here in headquarters and those 100 folks got to sleep on cots.

Our department scrambled around to clean up our area and cordon off the network server. Can't have a sleepwalker crashing the computers! The only way to turn off the lights is to throw the breakers, which are locked inside the technology warehouse. Sean and I did that around 9pm last night and then got a call at 6:30am to turn them back on. We stumbled back over pre-coffee and flipped the breakers. The cots were already cleaned up and sleepy new volunteers were milling about. No showers were available to them, but at least there were plenty of potties.

In other news, the donation of air time given to us by one of the cell phone providers ended rather abruptly last night, so my phone no longer works. I'll have to switch phones today and so will my old boss, my new boss and dozens of others. We found this all out while trying to connect for a pizza dinner and no one could use their phone. One guy never showed up and we could never reach him, so I hope he gets to work in one piece this morning.