Summit 5 is currently staying in an undisclosed, but totally awesome, location. This location does not really have Internet service except for one place when my friend is nice, so my posting may be sporadic. I wrote this post on the night of November 2nd, so there's a bit of a time-delay, for which I apologize--there simply hasn't been internet between then and now.
Sound good? Here we go. Summit 5 woke up at 5:30 this
morning, was in the van by 6:15 and in New York state by 7:30. At 11 PM last
night, my Team Leader got the call to move out tomorrow morning, so out we
moved. Summit Five, Semper Nomadic. After fighting traffic, long gas lines and
our own ignorance of the city—not to mention sketchy parking lot attendants—we
got to our staging area in-town, got our assignment and headed out to a Red
Cross shelter, which is all the location information I have. I couldn’t
navigate this city with a map, a GPS and my own personal satellite.
When we finally got to the shelter, housed in Nassau
Community College, our team and Bayou 2 were eventually assigned to help get
people registered. The shelter was full of Red Cross employees, its back rooms
full of bustling volunteers and shelter residents. We set up in teams of two to
walk people through the registration process, but the problem was
communication. Our AT&T Blackberries, which we were lending out so that
people could call the helpline, were useless in that shelter. Ditto our
government laptops, which we got out to (ideally) allow people to get on
DisasterAssistance.gov; there was no Wi-Fi and our Blackberries could not act
as hotspots. Despite that, Joe and I were able to help one woman (in her
nineties!) get registered on her friend’s personal phone, which made the hours
of Blackberry “Call Failed” messages more than worth it.
After leaving work, we wolfed down the remains of our Subway
foot-longs (half for lunch, half for dinner) and got into the van. As of this
writing, we have not left it, thanks to some wrong turns that left us careening
around the darkened streets of Brooklyn for more time than I care to admit. We
eventually made it to New Jersey, where our housing is, and even managed to
pick up some gasoline on the way. (Unfortunately, I think we burned most of it
rolling around New York just now!) We’re heading to what I last heard described
as a “barracks” to stay the night. No idea where we’re staying tomorrow night,
no idea what we’re eating tomorrow—travel funds might not extend to tomorrow, and
we’re simply not in one place long enough to buy and cook groceries and haul
out the cookware—and no idea where we’re working tomorrow or what we’ll be
doing. Such is life in FEMA Corps, but I’m happy to say we’re taking most of
this in stride.
The one thing I am more than a little mad about is my
absentee ballot. After a nearly five-week struggle to get registered, then to
get my village office to mail me my ballot, then convincing the lovely people
at the Government Accountability Board to email me a ballot because there was
simply no way for a paper ballot to catch up with me, I finally have the stupid
thing. It’s printed out, filled out and shoved in an envelope with all
signatures intact. The only thing I need to do is pop the sonofabitch into a larger
envelope, slap the requisite postage on it and mail it back to Wisconsin on or
before Election Day.
That may be more difficult than it seems, though, given
the fact that I never know where we’ll be on a given day, and that there is
often no time to go into a post office because we’re working, traveling to work
or traveling from work. Because of gas shortages, my TL has forbidden
extraneous trips to wherever else, which could scotch my hopes of voting
absentee once and for all. I’m just keeping my eyes out for post offices, UPS,
whatever that I can use and hoping like crazy that I can get it there in time.
I have moved heaven and earth to even get the damned thing and I’m not going to
let silly things like reality or temporal constraints stand in the way of
returning it. Details to follow. (UPDATE—I crammed the stupid thing into an
envelope, sealed it with masking tape, put four times the required number of
stamps on the letter and hand-delivered it to a postal worker in New York City.
BALLOT IN. I WIN, ELECTORAL SYSTEM.)
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