Disasters...

Over the past three weeks:

In FL, we discovered that a director had failed to turn in voter reg forms for months and had been lying to me about it. Thought for a little while I was going to lose my job over it, but did manage to get all the forms in to the office. The fine for doing so, which I originally thought was $50/form, is actually capped at $1000. Not good, but not the end.

While I was in Boston training idealistic youths, I got a call from my Philadelphia director that we were on the verge of being evicted. I had short-sightedly placed our office in a building downtown full of lawyers, software designers, real estate agents, and assorted yuppies. For good measure, I placed them across the hall from the property manager.

They turned out to be less then excited that we had 60 uneducated, loud, crass black people working for us registering voters, and coming back to the office space every day. The call I got had been the culmination in a slow-building game of intimidation and white guilt.

So I hopped a couple of buses. Karp picked me up and took me in. We watched Olympics together, like a couple of nancies, and then it was off to bed for the big day tomorrow. Upon my arrival, I immediately worked out a plan to have our people coalesce in the nearby fancy food court. Then, I spent some time looking for new office space.

The conversations went something like "Hi, I'm looking for a space to run a voter registration drive out of. My budget's pretty limited, and I'm looking for a one month lease..." Click. The following morning, hat in hand and in my groveling clothes, I went and threw myself on the mercy of the property manager, who was dandied right up in a tattersall suit, powderblue shirt with white collar, and pink tie. He walked me around the place, detailing the horrors of our staff, then told me my money still spent if I could keep the people out of the place, and just had our directors there making voter confirmation calls.

I had a sandwich, scouted out the park in front of City Hall, turned our operation in to an entirely outdoor enterprise, had a sandwich, then hopped the bus back to Boston.