Who Woulda Thought Free Was a Pain in the Neck?

Since I've moved to my new home I have not been able to find a job. So I have had to depend on a food bank. No big deal. God supplied me with food and I am reciprocating His good work and favor with doing my part at the food bank as a volunteer.

I am hard of hearing and I don't multi-task too well so when I went to donate my time I volunteered to lug the wagon of food to the recipients car and unload it for them. I have hearing aids I don't like to use them because in a dusty warehouse setting the cost of the hearing aids use ($8000) is prohibitive.

Since the volunteer aspect (It's transient help because most are offenders and they are doing community service) comes into play. The supervisor, extremely patient, has to finish up a job sometimes left undone. And the workload gets heavy on the regular and dependable. Therefor, I have made an effort to scope things out to see what can be done to alleviate unnecessary work. And this is the crux of my blog!

There are many older people unable to come to the food bank so we deliver food to them on Saturday's. This one wonderful woman heads that up. The first thing she needs are boxes clean enough to pack with the food. I noticed that I have time at certain times of the day so I volunteered to prepare these boxes. They contain junk that needs to be discarded so I do that and line them up in the manner she prefers to have them.

I started doing that yesterday. When I was relieved of my "lugging" duties I informed the lady, Sylvia, that takes the client info and disburses the food where I would be. I said to her, "I will be in back if you need me". Unfortunately this woman is also the kind of person that answers a question with a question. But since I didn't ask a question her curiosity came in and asked me what I was going to do. When I told her she, in her normal go to the max making conclusions, said, "Does Christie know what your doing?" and "Does Charles know what your doing?" and on and on like I'm some kind of stupid idiot. In addition, it was none of her business. Christie and I got together and we planned a strategy. I looked at her and just said, "You know where you can find me if you need me" and I simply ignored her line of questioning.

Now, it got worse. For one hour I cleaned the boxes to Christie's specs! It suddenly occurred to me I had stacked the boxes on the ground (a Federal guideline No-No in the food handling). So I asked this lady Rikki if the boxes needed to be elevated on pallets. She too answers questions with questions. She began riddling me with questions as to why I was what I was doing. I mean, she was walking around the entire hour I was assembling the boxes and it didn't occur to her to ask me what I was doing? I explained and I was finally able to pry out of her a simple answer.

THEN!! This guy, Jimmy, that walks around mumbling to himself comes over and he starts talking to Rikki about the box stack I was making. I didn't care what he asked because she answered him and it appeared that he knew what was going on. But I was wrong. When Christie came to see the operation she caught Jimmy loading up her boxes up on his truck. She told him to stop, she climbed up into the back of the truck and unloaded them. Jimmy just walked around in his usual weird manner mumbling to himself.

I was exasperated when I left for the day. BUT!!! Then when I arrived this morning I was hit with another snag. I calmly told the person I was up to my neck in hogwash and was leaving.

I should have left yesterday when all this "problem" was brewing. I am now at the library cooling off and getting away from the pain in the neck over a small job swerving into a major hassle!

Whew!! Thanks to Jesus for the relief!