Obnoxious Bitch

Sunday, September 04, 2005

In the relief effort, every little bit helps

Today I spent about 7 hours in the Interdictor IRC channels, monitoring and transcribing a couple of scanner channels being used by PD, FD and other relief workers.  At first I worked the feed coming out of Baton Rouge, until we lost that feed and I switched over to the San Antonio Airport effort.  It’s one small thing I can do, even though I’m far away and have already given as much monetary support as I can, to help my fellow human beings in such desperate need of help.

In the relatively few hours I spent typing their messages as fast as I could, it became all too clear just how massive an operation it is to move so many people at a time while making sure everyone has what they need.  The police, fire, medical and airport crews are in constant contact with one another, coordinating who goes where, gets what and does what.  Everything from how many people on an arriving flight will need medical assistance or transportation to the hospital, to the need for a janitor to clean and restock the bathrooms requires someone’s OK or orders.

It was truly an eye-opening experience to be a “fly on the wall” and hear how many ambulance crews were being dispatched back and forth, and who needed to be present in certain units responding to a call (such as an EMT, a firefighter and/or paramedic) as well as how many officers needed to be in place and what they had to do to facilitate a media tour.  It really gave me an appreciation for what all these agency folks are faced with and how hard they’re working to take care of as many people as humanly possible as quickly as possible.  To use the current slang, “MAD PROPS” to everyone who’s working so hard to see the victims of Katrina safely settled and placed.

The next time some asshole client or another is whining about this or that problem with their website is a “crucial emergency,” I might just have to verbally slap the shit out of them.  Compared to what the people on the ground in the relief effort are doing, what we web geeks do for a living is so much meaningless bullshit.  It’s difficult to assign the same level of importance to, say, a broken DNS redirect to a movie website as, say, a medical team calling desperately for more IV kits because they’re down to half a dozen and have a few hundred people coming in on planes who might need treatment.  The movie fans won’t even KNOW this new website’s not up, while getting fluids into a patient who needs it can be a matter of life and death.

It’s all in how you look at it, I guess… and the older I get, the more clearly I see how much time and energy I’ve wasted throughout my lifetime, worrying about things that are truly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.  When I leave this world, I’d much rather people remember me as a good human being who loved life, rather than a hard worker who did a good job.

Scanners are pretty much quiet now, which is a good sign.  It must mean they’ve gotten most everyone out and taken care of.  This old bitch needs to hit the hay…

Rox out.