Robo Hobo Homo #105

I blazed through the dishes, despite it being a chili night and everything I said earlier about tomato-based dishes.

If I thought the gas here was bad before, Chili Night must be the most ill omen in The Great Book of Ill Omens. He who reaps the chili will reap the chili winds.

Part of why the dishes went so well is because I had Future Octavio come in to help. Future Octavio looks like the forty-year-old version of my friend Octavio.

When I mentioned earlier that Wagner had a lot of radio components, I wasn't kidding. As it turns out, he and Tosh are kind of close friends. I saw them carting some stuff in while I was in the lobby after doing the dishes. It turns out that Wagner had scored “a few” radio parts from a dealer somewhere in town and they were unloading them from his car.

I like both of those guys and it sounded like an opportunity to do something cool, so I volunteered to help. There were radio parts two boxes deep in every surface of Wagner's car except for the driver's seat. Then he opened the trunk. It was a dazzling amount of old radios, resistors, circuits, transformers, and a couple of things I couldn't identify.

I talked with Wagner a bit about it while striking up a conversation with Tosh about Star Trek. Tosh likes Voyager, but if it's one good thing I can say about Star Trek (2009) it's that it makes liking Voyager more endearing than grating.

Wagner's hard for me to get a handle on. I know I use words like “good guy” and “nice” to describe people fairly often, but Wagner is a good guy. Like me, he's a bit weird, but he's just a slightly different type of weird.

Oh, and everyone made a joke about how we're building a time machine.

Robo Hobo Homo #104

I also took some time Saturday to call up some pawn shops in the area. Even packaged and in mint condition, they're not interested in my eBay phone. Don't quite know what I'm going to do about that.

I could ask folks around the shelter in person if they would like to buy it, but that's a whole other deal. I don't think anyone is going to steal anything, but my mind would rest a lot easier knowing that no one knows I've got anything worth taking.

Still, I can't sell it if people don't know I have it.

Robo Hobo Homo #103

From Friday 'til about Monday night, I ate a lot of bread and raisins. There's always bread here. Loads of it. Not sure why. I guess we get donated food that goes bad, and bread goes bad relatively quickly.

There's always bread out in the galley for folks to wander in and eat. Enough that despite the incredible varieties, I'm getting a bit sick of bread.

We also have raisins. Cases of raisins. I can only assume that someone donated a lot of raisins. So we have those hanging out the kitchen too. Now, I don't like raisins, really. They're not that sweet and they're kind of dry. They're even kind of ugly. They're talented musicians though.

I have come to love raisins. I can pack a little box to help me stay alert through a night shift. They have 120 calories in those little boxes, but they're still not a bad light snack or a rough meal replacement.

Raisins: They're a food that's not more bread.

Robo Hobo Homo #102

I got the mail, which included the phone I ordered on eBay. I really liked the lobby shift. It was basically barge work plus standing a watch. I managed to take some phone calls, remind guys when they had mail and laundry, and otherwise just do stuff for two hours straight. I really liked it.

I also finally got around to doing my laundry. I had forgotten on Thursday do it, and in all of the confusion had to put it off Friday and I finally got a heap o' stuff washed. Bono called in and he said he was going to be working late with his disabled brother and wanted me to pass that on to Yesbert, who—as I'd suspected—told me that a phone call about that shit wasn't enough.

A lot of folks here are recovering from drug problems so it's important that they not be able to vanish for a night and simply come back in the morning. Purgatory House doesn't want to help folks that are just going to crash here between getting high, so suddenly going on an unauthorized absence with no notice is a red flag.

I rebuilt the personnel list and discovered that I didn't have a card on file. You know what they say, the misfile you find may be your own. I kind of miss me being on lobby because everyone since then has misspelled my name.

Lunch rolled around, and I guess Dennis is adamant that folks on lobby can't duck out to get food. I'd like to stay on his good side, so I was resigned to not having any, but Wheelchair Guy offered to get me some. Heart of gold, that guy.

Between being on watch and having to shake people down for watches, I've been learning a lot of people's names.

Robo Hobo Homo #101

When I got in, Mike asked me to pick up a lobby shift that morning in exchange for the one he'd taken care of.

I crashed for a bit, then got back up for my shift. It was my first lobby, and after all of the action on the previous day it was a relief to get on with it. It went pretty well.

The Mumblr I talked about earlier was discharged. Everyone was on edge. It turns out he's certifiably crazy. While I was hanging out with Larry the previous day, he talked to me about his lobby watches. Larry, like many people's grandparents, pretends to get up really early, but cheats by taking naps. Larry prefers staying up at night so he takes night shifts in the lobby.

During one of those shifts, he caught The Mumblr pissing in the bushes outside. At every meeting I've attended here, Dave mentions how there's no urinating in the bushes in the front of the shelter. I assumed that it was guys who were smoking and lazy, but it turns out it was The Mumblr, deliberately pissing in the bushes at night.

His story was that he took tobacco out of the garbage on the back patio to put in his pipe. He's pretty broke, so that's how he gets his tobacco. Apparently he accidentally put marijuana from that garbage into his pipe and then...somehow he's peeing in the bushes?

He was certifiable and despite all of my sturm and drag over the fates of other guys around here, I didn't feel bad about that. I mean, there are other shelters and he can get health care.

I guess I'll talk about how wrong I was when I get to Thursday though.

Robo Hobo Homo #100

I did make the most of it though. As I had left, I saw some candy machines in the not-a-mall. They only took quarters and my change collection was almost exclusively nickels and dimes. Just to show I did learn something in college, I availed myself of a nearby vending machine. Because vending machines dispense change and returned money in the most efficient denominations, you can turn small change into quarters. Twenty seconds later my dollar of loose change wealth had been redistributed into four quarters.

Larry had asked me expectantly about candy at some point during the past. I hadn't had any at the time, but things were good and I wanted to share with one of my closest friends at the shelter. Two quarters got me enough Mike & Ikes to satisfyingly fill one of my smaller zip-loc bags.

I don't remember much of the walk to the shelter. It's not quite a ninety-minute blank spot in my memory, but it's close. According to my calculations, once I started doing 10 hour shifts I'd be spending 13 hours on each work day working. Assuming—ha!—eight hours of sleep, that would be three hours for every other bodily function and personal need I might attend to.

Reflecting on it later Saturday morning, it didn't feel like a good match. I thought about continuing working on it while looking for something else. 

“If nothing else,” I thought humorously, “I could become a blogger.”

Robo Hobo Homo #099

Inside of work was Kitty. She was friendly with a slight accent or maybe a speech impediment that picked up when she was on a call. I think it was a change in her voice that she used to put people at ease. I kind of do the same thing with my very, very understated southern dialect.

The work was straightforward. We answer call queues where we provide information, take messages or alert on-call staff. We remotely monitor equipment and log or dispatch personnel. It's pretty straightforward in retrospect, but that night, tired as I was, it was overwhelming.

When I arrived, my email account didn't have some group permissions, but everything else was set up just fine. Navigating the system was a great way for me to try and stay awake while learning things, but it wasn't effective enough.

I was drained, but I didn't want to make any trouble by brewing coffee. Eventually I remembered that I'd packed some raisins and water and, remembering my SEAL training (Watching G.I. Jane counts as SEAL training!), rationed them out to try to help things.

The night didn't go well. I left thinking that I'd found another job I couldn't stand and afraid I'd never find one that I could.