This isn't breakfast!

Yesterday morning I stepped outside to go to work and there it was…

The first cool morning in a LONG time.

I have reverse seasonal disorder, I think…I love fall and winter cold weather and that first cool, fall-ish morning just makes me soo happy.

It was the same this morning and should be all this week so I shall carry on with the belief that the Texas summer is over and it won’t get above 85 degrees again till at least next April.

Do NOT burst my bubble, please.

I got to work yesterday morning, got to my desk and one of the supervisors scurried over and told me to head upstairs to one of the conference rooms.

*start panic*

That’s never a good sign but upstairs I went and found out I was gonna be in training all day.

The hurricane knocked out our Houston facility so we were getting a crash course in the calls they take.

They also are letting the people from Houston come here to San Antonio to work.

They are paying them $.50 a mile for their travel and are putting them up here.

Basically they spent 6 hours training us yesterday for a job that new people get trained on for 6 weeks.

In all honesty, my ADD kicked in with a vengeance and I spent the vast majority of the day yesterday surfing the next and sending text messages. I just CANNOT focus in that situation so I have really no clue about what we are supposed to be doing.

On the positive side, kinda, today we are holed up in a training room and my computer up here doesn’t have the necessary programs loaded so I can’t take calls. I’ve already read all my daily blogs so I figured I’d type up an entry.

There are several people in the room from Houston and they are providing quite a bit of comic relief.

One of them has been VERY vocal about her disappointment in the food provided.

Yesterday they brought us boxed lunches. I had a turkey on wheat and it. Was. Good.

This morning, as soon as we all got here, they came around with Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee and the Houston people had a FIT.

“Donuts?? What the hell kinda breakfast is DONUTS?? And isn’t there any hazelnut creamer for the coffee???”

The rest of us just looked at each other and tried to not crack up.

Today they are bringing in a full Italian lunch and I can’t wait to see what they have to say about that.

$.50 a mile for travel and a week at a pretty nice hotel is NOT a bad deal.

And it’s not like these are people who lost their homes…every one of them in here had their electricity back on the day after the hurricane hit and the only reason they are here is that the windows were blown out in the building where they work so they are here till Saturday.

I’ve been listening to some of them take calls and I think it’s good that my system isn’t working.

The calls they take are all for Medicaid and I admittedly have compassion issues when it comes to that and from what I’m hearing it’s gonna be a challenge.

Most of the plans we have for these callers have a $1 co-pay.

For EV. REE. THING.

You go to the doctor? A buck. Emergency room? A buck. Have a baby, you pay a buck.

One of the Houston people just took a call from a woman who had gastric bypass surgery and she was SCREAMING at her that she was NOT paying that dollar because she is on Medicaid and it should be FREE.

It’s the principal, it seems.

Oy.

When I was 16 I got fired from a grocery store.

Back then, food stamps came in a book and they were shaped just like money and came in 1’s and 5’s and 10’s.

Well, one thing I saw EVERY DAY was people coming in and buying something really small and getting the change back.

This bothered me QUITE a bit because I saw all that tax money leaving my pay and going to these people.

Finally, one day I just HAD it.

A woman came in with 6 children, each armed with a $1 food stamp.

I’d seen her doing this many times before.

By the registers there was a candy display and in it you could buy a single piece of bubble gum for $.02. They would each get one piece and one by one they would come through my line and hand me a $1 food stamp and I’d have to give them $.98 back.

They would hand that to the mother, who was waiting in line behind them, and she would use the change to buy cigarettes.

She put the cigarettes down in front of me and threw the change down and I told her no.

She looked at me funny and said “Huh?” and I told her that I wasn’t selling her cigarettes when she was using MY tax money to pay for them. I don’t remember the exact exchange but we went back and forth and I told her she was scum for doing that and involving her children and she called the manager over. Long story short, I was fired on the spot and she bought her cigarettes and laughed at me as she ushered her kids and her cigarettes out of the store.

I was upset about being fired, but it felt good to stand up against something I thought was wrong.

I do think that incident left a really strong mark on me though because to this day I have to check myself when it comes to certain situations.

It happened last night when I was watching the news and they were showing people in Galveston who lost everything in the hurricane and were complaining that people weren’t doing enough to help them.

These are people who refused to leave despite the mandatory order to do so and my first reaction was along the lines of “Jesus, shut the hell UP. You shoulda LEFT when they told you to!”

Then they were talking to one of the rescue workers who had been working day and night to pull people out of their homes that were now roof-deep in water and the reporter asked him what reason were people giving for not leaving and he thought for a second and said, simply, “They have nowhere to go”.

That’s when it clicked in my brain that even though I’m currently estranged from just about everyone I know, all it would take would be a phone call and I would have a place to stay if I needed it.

And then I realized that not everyone has that.

Sure there are shelters…I know here in San Antonio there are thousands of people here but really, how would that be??

Packing up what you could carry and driving to a strange city to stay in shelter?

Sleeping on a cot surrounded by hundreds of strangers?

Right now, I wouldn’t have the money to drive anywhere.

And what about my job?

My cats?

I go about my life with the genuine belief that I am a caring and kind person then things like this crop up and I’m not so sure.

It’s definitely something I need to work on.