Thursday 8/6/2020
Long, intense day! 7:15 I met with Marcia, the other lucky volunteer to be volunteer coordinator, and Kim HR (actually Kim Kurtis, not to be confused with the other Kim K., Kim Krebs), and we did meal delivery.
It’s really simple. You wait patiently and after about ten minutes one of the kitchen staff wheel out a tall aluminum cart with many shelves. On the shelves are 20+ trays, each tagged with a room number, all for a particular floor. You wheel the cart to the elevator, up to the floor, and distribute the trays to the rooms. People were surprised to see me instead of a staff person, and several were interested in volunteering. Bring the empty cart back to the lobby and wait another ten minutes until the next cart comes out.
After all the carts were out, Marcia, Kim HR and I went to her office and talked at length about employing resident volunteers. Kim and other staff had put together a list of possible jobs. Marcia and I went off to our separate rooms to make some of this happen. The whole day was taken up with emailing and phoning back and forth trying to figure out how to do this.
The first two jobs we are trying to implement are the meal delivery, and package reception. The meal delivery needs two volunteers, three meals, seven days. How to keep track of who wants to do what. Everybody has a different plan, some don’t want to work breakfasts, some can only do Tuesdays, etc. After we had floundered with spreadsheets a bit, I said bleep it, I’m making a Slottr sign-up sheet like I was doing for FOPAL. That appears it is going to work. It really wasn’t hard setting up a sheet with 21 slots for a week’s meals, room for 2 names in each slot. Then I sent a job description and invite to the main CHBB list, and immediately volunteers starting replying. I directed them to the signup sheet and by this time, quite a few slots are filled.
The package reception job is different. Many residents are ordering stuff primarily but not wholly from Amazon, so something between 30 and 50 (at a guess) packages get dumped outside our front door each day, a bunchfrom UPS and Fedex in the morning, and a bunch more from USPS in the afternoon. Front desk staff has been bringing them in, marking the destination room number on each in big marker digits, and arranging them on a long table. Then they log receipt of the package and call the recipient’s room to say, you’ve got a package.
This is a huge PITA for the front desk person. So we’re going to take it over with resident volunteers. I put a description of this job on CHBB about 10 and have 13 names tonight. I will convene a zoom meeting of those names on Tuesday, I figure, and kind of encourage them to organize themselves.
There are another half-dozen jobs we haven’t advertised yet — the day was intense enough thank you very much. Monday is the monthly residents association meeting, 100+ people will zoom in, and I will describe all the jobs available. I expect lots more sign ups that afternoon. Marcia is preparing a document describing all the jobs to distribute to everyone’s mailboxes.
Oh yeah, I cleaned my apartment in the afternoon as well. Going to bed now.
Codgerville 