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 #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 #095

There was still the matter of chores. Washing dishes from five to seven pm is a big chunk of time, but it was—and still is—the best chore I could have for the schedule I have. Dinner that night was spaghetti.

If you don't do dishes often, let me tell you about tomato-based sauces; they fuck up your dish-doing. They form a film on the top of the water that coats everything you put into the sink. They leave an invisible residue on dishes. They sink into wood. Spaghetti is a pain in the ass.

We do have a restaurant setup here. As a shelter, the kitchen has to operate to code. We've got a rinsing station. We've got a sink for washing, a sink with a bleach soak, and a rinsing sink. It's the whole nine yards. Tosh recently got us pH strips so we can log the effectiveness of the chlorine solution in the bleach soak. It helps a bit.

I didn't get any spaghetti that night, but I did have to wash a lot of it.

Robo Hobo Homo #093

I did have some time before dinner came and I had to wash dishes. Until then, I had a few moments and I saw Wagner working on a piece of electronics equipment at the lobby desk. We talked about it a bit. I understood the general principles of what he was saying, so I could keep up, but the guy does RF like no one's business. He's a geeky type and he looks every inch of it. He's usually pretty quiet and exudes a serious anxiousness most of the time, so it was great to see him light up as he described it all.

Apparently, he'd gotten it cheap because it was broken. Once he opened it up, it turned out that the gearing on some of the resistor banks were out. After swapping out the gears it worked just fine and he'd been using it to fine-tune his wi-fi ever since. Well, he'd been using that or one of the other RF Generators he had for that. Dude has a lot of electronics, as I'd learn later.

Robo Hobo Homo #091

After my sandwich break, I needed to get to the business of interacting with a lot of people. I needed engage with people and ask them the favor of swapping watches with me at the last minute. It was awful, but I did my best at it.

It wasn't very effective. I finally had to get with Mike, the guy who handles the lobby watches, to take care of my shift that night and I knew I'd still be spending most of the next day taking care of my Sunday shifts.

The next issue was getting an overnight pass from a caseworker. They're pretty strict about curfew. I guess they don't want guys skulking around at night and doing drugs. Daryl was out for the weekend. The thing is that there aren't any caseworkers here on weekends, so you can't get an overnight pass on a weekend. Plus it was Memorial Day Weekend, so it'd be Tuesday before anyone came back. Down here, you gotta be nimble to take advantage of opportunities that come up and holidays are not nimble.

Fortunately, Brandi was there late. Is three pm late? Whatever the case, she wasn't sure on the overnight working paperwork, but Yesbert, the house coordinator, was familiar with it and helped us through it.

I also made some handwritten copies of my schedule to distribute to Dennis, the chore coordinator, and my case worker. It didn't occur to me that that half of that schedule would have passed by the time Dennis saw it, but I was lucky to get anything done.

It sounds really easy, but there was a lot of running around and anxiety about it. Everyone I've mentioned and at least that many people who are unnamed were performing their own duties, trying to get away for the weekend, or trying to get work of their own.

Worth it though.

Robo Hobo Homo #071

Have I mentioned we're shorthanded? Some guys left. I think one of them got kicked out. Another one I think got his own place. Pally's getting his own place so he's moving out soon. One of my other roommates never quit doing drugs and was just staying here. He claimed the drugs helped him write and that for the first time since his girlfriend died, he was writing again. He also said the drugs were a way of him killing himself, but then he just left today because he figured he'd gone long enough without them.

At this point I'd like to note that if I talked to people, I'd know just what kind of drugs he was talking about. Man, even when white people are homeless and surrounded by people who know from drugs, we still don't talk about this stuff openly.

So there were some extra lobby positions. I initially volunteered for the 0200 to 0400 spots, since they were nice and quiet but I forgot that things run later on weekends. Plus I picked up a 2200-0000 watch because of dudes that left and that one is, I think, the worst.

I've got to make sure folks are in their racks. I've got to write up people who arrive after curfew. I've got to sign up people to get kicked out if they come in too late after curfew.

I do not want to be in this spot and I predict nothing but disaster.

Robo Hobo Homo #070

Dennis runs the chores around here. He's a simple, salt-of-the-earth guy. He does his job, has a moustache, a hat he always wears, and generally treats people well. He's over fifty so he has a hard time finding a job. He's got a tumor on his spine and he needs a hip replaced. We're shorthanded around here to he helped me finish up the dishes tonight, in addition to everything else he was doing.

He's homeless, but he's getting the tumor removed soon and he's also receiving a hip replacement.

Thanks Obama.

Robo Hobo Homo #064

I'm not sure if it was Wednesday or Tuesday, but I finally apologized to Wagner. Probably Tuesday after all the 'Stache Saga. We use three sinks for laundry. They empty into a common basin, so it's important to only drain one sink at a time. That's what I did, but none the less, the basin still overflowed and I had to start mopping up in addition to all of my other messes I'd had to clean up.

Anyway, Wagner was in there and he wanted to help me out, good guy that he is. I decided that I was about five minutes too late to apologize to him, but I did it anyway.

Let that be a lesson to me about not putting off apologizing to people.

Robo Hobo Homo #054

Amongst everything else Tuesday night, I noticed that we were drying dishes on a regular bed sheet stretched across a wire rack. I asked around and no one knew when it had last been replaced. I replaced it Wednesday morning and put it and the aprons we use to do dishes in the laundry room, on the assumption that the house laundry guy would do it, sight-unseen.

He didn’t and I guess I should have gotten with him, but upon further investigation, it was ‘Stache and I just didn’t want to go there. He seems like kind of a dick even on his good days and I while I’m not great with people I think that I can official say that we “have history.”

So I signed up for a laundry slot Thursday to wash the aprons myself (and the linen, if it was still there), but I completely forgot because I ended up waiting for so long to do internet stuff.

Anyway, by not telling anyone about moving the aprons and stuff, nothing got done, the other dishwashers were thrown off and I’m now behind on my personal laundry schedule.

Robo Hobo Homo #051

Look ‘Stache was a jerk about things when he didn’t have to be, but getting a nice meal at the end of your work day when you’re coming home to a homeless shelter full of farting guys is a really small request.

I finished up the dishes, signed it off, and made my way to the lobby to ask the lobby guy if I could write myself up for not watching the kitchen securely enough.

I don’t use the phrase “blew his mind” lightly because people love to say that about the things they do, but this might be the one time I legitimately blew the mind of someone over the age of twelve.

He didn’t know how to react and we talked—very civilly—about it before he got up and got Tosh for back up. They started saying really nice things and other folks were walking by and I—

I tend to get a bit of praise over here. I’ll go over the praise thing later (and the other thing with Tosh. I haven’t forgotten!), but I get a lot.

It was all a bit much, I slid off of the seat with a “This is getting awkward. I’m…gonna go now.”

With that, I took my leave and hit the rack early and unsatisfied.

Robo Hobo Homo #050, The 'Stache Saga, Part II

I went to get Tosh, the guy who runs the kitchen, and there’s another misadventure there, but when I got back, I let ‘Stache know that we didn’t have his meal and that Tosh would be up to get something for him. ‘Stache was angry and asked point blank if there was no meal and I told him no. There wasn’t. That it had been put aside, but someone else had eaten it. He’d signed up just like he was supposed to, but we fucked up.

I should have let Tosh know that ‘Stache didn’t want a consolation prize, but I didn’t think about that. I was just angry that I’d kept such poor control of my watchstation and that now a person was suffering for it.
 
Sure 'Stache was making himself a salad and he was being kind of a jerk about things, but he was right: if he signed up for the meal then he should have gotten it. I was the only person in charge of the kitchen after he cook left and it was my fault he didn’t get his meal.

Whenever Tosh arrived, instead of backing down when ‘Stache vented at him, he bowed up. The two yelled, ‘Stache yelled a little angrier, and eventually things got quiet. I had returned to doing the dishes.

Later, Tosh came in, asking if ‘Stache had yelled at me. He explained that he’d written up ‘Stache for their altercation and wanted to put the screws to him. I evaded, simply saying that I considered ‘Sache’s actions towards me to be reasonable given the context.

A guy shouldn’t get written up twice because we couldn’t make good on our commitment to him.

Robo Hobo Homo #049, The 'Stache Saga, Part I

So I might have mentioned that I do dishes after dinner. It usually takes me about two hours. I need to cut it down to something reasonable like an hour and a half, but it’s a work in progress.

There are a lot of guys in the kitchen at night. Sometimes the breakfast cook comes in to make something. Sometimes cleanup crews come in. Sometimes the guy that runs the kitchen comes in and…I think I’ve griped about this before now that I come to think of it.

One of the things the night cook does is check the sign-up sheet on the door to see who needs a late dinner. The goal is that everyone gets a job so they can move out, right? Well, the shelter still provides dinner even if you’re working during dinner. It’s pretty sweet.

Well at night I’m sometimes the only person in the kitchen with the evening meals. Now, I don’t have any specific authority over it, but I’m the only person ‘on the clock’ while folks are getting their meals. I’ll usually notice when someone saunters in to get a meal, but I generally do my job and assume everything goes to plan.

Until Tuesday night, whenever a guy, ‘Stache, didn’t get his meal. He came in an asked about it, but I didn't see it on the table for late dinners. I felt pretty bad and checked around the kitchen for it, but if it wasn’t on the table, then someone ate it.

Robo Hobo Homo #040

The lobby is also the guy who signs people in. He gives folks their first orientation, checks their names against those of known sex offenders, asks them about weapons, sets up their bedding, issues linens. It's important stuff.

Granted, you're not quite an authority. Everyone here is pretty much on the same level. One of the guys working desk, I'll call him Mark Trail for reasons you'd agree with if you ever saw him in person, asked another guy, Troy, to leave the desk area. Now, I only picked up this conversation after they started yelling at each other, so I don't know how it started.

None the less, Troy didn't appreciate being asked to leave and Mark didn't appreciate him not leaving when asked so they argued about it and eventually Troy accused Mark of being a racist which marked the point where you knew there wasn't going to be an amicable solution.

I was within earshot, but in another area at the time and it was the first argument I've heard since coming here. As I continued working on my executive sales position application, I heard them continuing to snipe at each other over the course of the next few hours.

So I'm not worried about standing desk because at least there's a bottom on this thing.

Robo Hobo Homo #039

But the lobby is more than just impenetrable social conventions. People have medications and there's an actual postage box thing set up for folks to take their medications. The lobby guy has a master lock that covers the postage box and the person taking the box has the key to the PO Box with the medication in it. The lobby logs whenever someone takes their medication and how much they take and then everything gets locked up again.

There's a log book too. It's not much of one. It's a civilian, we-don't-know-how-log-books-work log book, but it's there and it seems to be filled out in good faith. There are keys to hand off just like when I worked offshore.

And the clipboards. Permission to stay overnight, permission to sleep during the day, laundry schedules, work sign-offs, labor pools, rack assignments. It goes on.

I love it. I haven't done it yet, but I love it.

Robo Hobo Homo #038

After the house meeting, I had to learn how to run the desk in the lobby. It was the standard fare; a demonstration of rules in writing followed up immediately with how 40% of that gets ignored. And I, a robot, get to figure out which 40% that is with no social intuition whatsoever.

For example, you're not supposed to be sleeping during the day unless you have permission. This guy on my left is sleeping in a chair in the dining area. Folks aren't waking him up, but then I don't know if a staffer, like Daryl, were to come by, if they would wake him up and give him a warning, give him an infraction straight up (one of the five needed to kick you out), or simply ignore him. I just don't know because it's all arbitrary to my robot senses.

Anyway, lobby training was pretty iffy, but all my shifts are from 0200 to 0400 on weekends, so I'm not too worried.

Maybe I'll do some ride-alongs in the evening as my schedule permits though.

Robo Hobo Homo, #037

If I handle the lobby for three shifts of two hours each, wash dishes seven days a week for an hour and a half, and volunteer at the Thrift Store for another three hours, that's 19.5 hours of work every week to stay here. Temporarily.

I'm not complaining, but it keeps me busy. I do dinner dishes so I end up falling out to the kitchen right after dinner. On Mondays and Thursdays, there's a house meeting after dinner. Daryl brings up some things and other guys go over things. New chores are announced on Monday (still dinner dishes).

This Monday had two things: new lobby training for guys who are new (such as myself) and a pitch from Oxford House.

Now, according to Daryl, 90% of the guys here have a substance abuse problem. That's heavy. Another few have mental illnesses (my mumblr from earlier definitely has mental illnesses). I'm not sure about the rest.

Oxford House is apparently about guys living together, living without substance abuse, being a community, and paying pretty low rents. It was interesting, if not really insightful.

If it's one thing I've learned, it's that social connections are more important than talent when it comes to getting along in the world. If your social connections let you spin into a cycle of drug abuse, then you've got a shitty set of options when you get out of rehab. You can either have no connections or you can immerse yourself in an old life.

I can see how organizations like Oxford House would act as a new social network to integrate oneself into.

Robo Hobo Homo #014

I've been doing dishes after dinner since my second day here. Everyone staying at Purgatory Shelter signs up for a chore on Monday or Sunday, then they do that chore from Tuesday until the following Monday.

On Thursday night, the guy who signed up for washing the dishes after dinner on Monday wasn't able to do it anymore. I guess with a lot of guys coming and going, those things are bound to happen. I volunteered to help a guy named Nick out with them. He showed me the ropes and we did a bang-up job of it.

So the next day someone asked me to take over full-time on the dishes and I accepted. It's basically like a restaurant; scouring, washing, soaking, rinsing, drying, then putting up dishes for a full dining floor (plus pots, pans, serving trays, etc).

It takes its toll on my hands and my back, but the hardest part is keeping the kitchen secure. Germs can spread easily from the kitchen, so it's important to keep it clear of any unnecessary people who come in.

Folks still stroll in though. Most of them have a good reason. They keep a hot water pot, the garbage bags, and late meals back there. People need access to those things for the sake of keeping the shelter going and it makes sense for someone to jump in, get them, and jump back out again instead of not having them.

Other times, people just want to eat things that they aren't supposed to be eating. I even had the guy in charge of coordinating the kitchen come in just to play some music. If the people who are in charge of enforcing the rules aren't doing it, who will? As the guy doing chores in there, I'm the only one who has a right to be there, but then this isn't an environment where I can simply push back on principle. I mean, I could, but then I'd be climbing the mountain the next day.

I'm learning though and we'll see how well I can secure the perimeter tonight.