i’m exhausted - and that’s just from daily routines and circumstances ...
been sleeping in three hour shifts every twelve hours to try keep up with United Kingdom time where my wife is stranded for five days as a result of a one day blizzard in Newark, NJ - does Continental Airlines offer hotel vouchers or the next available aircraft, or even upgrades for less than 4K to business first [where seats are available] ? - ix-nay !
Can you reach them by telephone without a message saying they can’t complete your call because of high volume - even though you called every half hour for almost twenty hours straight? - nyet !
so i surrendered to it and got to bed around 1 a.m. to be awoken by a panicking neighbor's phone call at 3 a.m. because someone was banging on her door and she was alone with two small children since her husband got stranded in Philadelphia because of the weather. It turned out to be a nurse whose shift ended at 11p.m. - and even though the highways were closed because of a state of emergency, the hospital didn’t offer to accommodate their staff - so the nurse attempted to take the overland routes using her G.P.S. which turned a half hour commute into a four hour drive under treacherous conditions. To top it off, her on-board navigator led her to the road past my studio/barn which is commonly referred to as ‘the goat path’ by locals, because that’s what its been used for over the past two hundred years - a single lane, 350 foot, winding drop, lined with trees that often fall when exposed to severe weather - and they did, leaving the nurse stuck and stranded.
And this wasn’t the first time - last spring a tractor trailer got stuck on the same road because his G.P.S. said it was the shortest route to his destination. It only took eight hours and two tow trucks and major damage to get him out ...
Did either one of them stop when they saw the road narrow or start to dramatically decline - did the township mount a warning sign after the truck did significant property damage? nope !
Are we beginning to recognize a pattern yet? yep!
Last night on Keith Olbermann someone was saying that our lack of effective mobilization during emergency situations represents a major security threat.
I’ll go one further - a lack of common sense and decency will destroy us!
