When hundreds of Katrina evacuees poured into my small town, I naturally stepped up to the plate. After all, I’ve worked in local government most of my adult life. I have disaster recovery experience and can leap tall politicians in a single bound. I can run an election with one hand tied behind my back and no hanging chads! Last time a candidate wanted to contest one of my elections, his attorney perused my files for a few hours and left mumbling something about how I even documented the numbers on the ballot seals. Hello? You’re an attorney, pal, and you didn’t know that’s the law? Anyway, he never came back. Katrina recovery efforts are replete with legal roadblocks, technicalities, and government fine print so I’m just the right person to weed through bureaucracy and help these folks….or so I thought until the day the cell phones arrived.
The chaos actually began before the phones arrived. “What can I do to help?” asked a kindly benefactor. Well, we had 370 people using two telephones. These people really needed cell phones so they’d have a call back number for FEMA, housing opportunities, and potential employers. We had no idea this dear man would have to swear to Cingular on penalty of prison that he was not a post disaster parasite buying cheap cell phones to auction off from a rowboat on the lake formerly known as the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard areas of New Orleans. Getting to that point is another story in itself.
But eventually the phones were on their way. I had made arrangements with the county commissioner to use his courtroom to charge 100 cell phones. I’d collected surge protectors, multi-outlet converters and sharpies along with an army of people to charge phones and help me distribute them. We were ready. Then Cingular called.
Warning: Take two Tylenol, Advil, or Aleve and drink a minimum of sixteen ounces of legal addictive stimulants before reading from this point forward.
Cingular told me that they hadn’t sent me 100 phones activated and ready to hand out. They sent me 100 empty phones. I would have to insert batteries, insert SIM cards in each phone, charge the phones and then activate them one at a time by calling an 800 number and that was only after I had recorded each phone’s fifteen digit IMEI number, twenty digit SIM card number and thirteen digit pin numbers for the initial $10 on the phone and also the subsequent $25 that the benefactor also bought. Then I’d record the ten digit telephone number and the assigned nine digit account number as I activated the phones and only after I had done all this would the phone be ready to put in somebody’s hand.
Okay, let’s spell this out. An extremely busy man, a Hollywood screenwriter with a heavy shooting schedule, out of the goodness of his heart pays Cingular $3000 for 100 refurbished “go-phones” and another $2500 for 100 prepaid cards and all Cingular has to do is mail me the butt naked phones? No. Hell, no.
It took some whining and a few threats from my friend Guido, but I got Cingular to agree to activate the phones for me in groups of twenty and I made a spread sheet that we emailed back and forth with account names, phone numbers and account numbers as they were assigned. Then little blue elves handed out the phones and all was right with the universe. Nope. It took more than a week to work out the details and my army of volunteers moved on to other things. It was now just me and my sons.
First we had to number 100 boxes and 100 SIM cards so there’d be no mixing them up. Seventeen of the 100 phones had dead batteries and there were 100 missing SIM cards. Fed Ex deliveries of the SIMs never arrived and a Cingular representative had to drive to Fort Worth to pick up the SIM cards and hand deliver them to me in our small community east of Dallas. But what to do about the batteries? Nobody knew.
So, we took the dead batteries out and put them in phones #84-100 so we could go about activating the first 83 phones. We sent the spread sheet to Cingular and whoops, some of those SIM cards were already active in other phones. Argh. We had to wait on Fed Ex replacements for those SIM cards. Geez, who’d have thought giving away 100 cell phones was so complex?
But hey, I had at least 50 ready to go phones, so we started going to shelters, laptop in hand, and distributing the phones that were active. I identified the evacuee, verified that I hadn’t already given one to someone in their family, typed their information into my laptop, and assigned a phone while one of my sons wrote their name and phone number on the corresponding box. We were met with cheers, relief, tears, and then “hey, do you have one of these instruction books in English?”. Huh? We opened another box. Spanish book. Then another box. Spanish. We checked all the boxes. Almost every one had an instruction book written only in Spanish. Oh geez.
Most of the people who needed the phones were low income folk with not enough technical savvy to understand the books anyway. So we read up on how to operate the phones and showed people how to use them as we handed them out. Meanwhile, I get a call from Cingular. You know those 17 dead batteries? Well, they couldn’t sent me 17 new batteries. They told me to send the entire phone, SIM cards, etc back and they’d send me 17 new phones where I'd have the privilege of starting this whole number writing process over.
This went on and on: new batteries, more dead batteries, dead phones, replaced SIM cards and a lot of mailing back and forth. Suffice it to say that eventually we got 99 of the 100 phones distributed and had one irreconcilable DOA. What about that 100th phone? Well, I called the Cingular rep and told her to credit it to my benefactor’s card. I’d had it. Even though it was well worth all the grief, I was relieved this cell phone odyssey was over.
“I was about to call you,” said my Cingular rep, “Somebody just bought 4000 cell phones and he needs a volunteer to coordinate the donation for him.” Um, volunteer? Me?…I’ll have to get back to her on that.
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