I'm not in a good mood today. The grit-eyes continues.

���� I'm currently at the reliable but purple-screened computer. It's dirty, beige, coffee-stained, fifteen inch data entry machine on a table at the rear wall of the building, right by a big window that looks out on a courtyard lushly treed and vined by neglect. To my right is True See's cubicle, and against the walls to my left and back are the the six computers that comprise the South End NSC community computer lab. Phil, a fuzzy-froed, slightly rank science guy with thick glasses camps daily at PC 1, where he searches for research positions at universities. Jerry works at PC 4 on various projects Powerpoint, Publisher and web, and is either really pleasant or really cranky depending, as he says, on the hormones. Most of the other computer users are kids, either playing games or fine tuning their pages on blackplanet and migente. There was a guy for a while, Derek, who set up like it was his office, made phone calls, wore a blue suit and made demands; he argued constantly with Phil and Jerry about things like women, and chicken, and who got to sit where.

���� Staff members are me, True See, Marilyn, Laura, and Vonnessa. Laura and Marilyn are among my favorite people to have worked with, ever. They're single mothers in their late 20s; their daughters come in some afternoons and the frequent games are bust on people in the neighborhood, do your homework, and sneak up on others and scare them silly. True See just started this week and I'm not sure what to think of him. He's not really given me anything to think except that he likes silky baggy dress pants, big shiny watches, and his cell phone clipped to his belt. Vonnessa is the director and has such focused bourgeois preoccupations that I don't know what else to say about her. Like the kids, staff members here also have pages on migente and blackplanet. Everyone except me and True See.

���� Mostly I've been taking care of the details other people don't feel like doing. Logging the services rendered, helping clients with computer use, editing resumes, clearing junk off hard drives, cleaning the conference room, working on Vonnessa's office move. But it's all really casual so most of the time if I don't feel like doing it, I don't have to. I just wander around and most of the day, I do what I want.

���� What happens here is that people in the neighborhood come for different kinds of help. Food from the food pantry, an application for fuel assistance, help with a resume, or a staff member to act as a reference. Things like that. What is conspicuously absent is something that would make the services more cohesive and would shift the balance from expenditure to investment: education. People who come in for help in a job search should get some kind of lesson in writing, or employment culture, or computer use. If people thought they could learn something here, I think they would come to learn. But everyone's expectations are low. Clients and staff alike think of this office as a budget-challenged quick fix outpost, and that works as an excuse for management to not develop any educational component to client services, which maybe would take some time and imagination, but would otherwise be free.

���� On his first day, True See asked me to help him set up an internet radio account. I should have pretended to not know how, or I should have made something up about the proxy server, because now it's True See and Kenny G, and they're d-r-o-n-i-n-g.


0 Comments