Yesterday after work I wound up volunteering to answer phones for the American Red Cross for seven hours. The "funny" thing is, I didn't even go into work planning on anything. I didn't know the opportunity even existed until I got there that morning...
American Red Cross is, understandably, overwhelmed with calls from people wanting to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Luckily, local branches have the ability to branch out even further. Darryl (the adjustor, not the rep) had recruited a few people from our call center to help out, and Alberto was the one who told me about this. It was only about a four block walk from work (I lied to Dad that someone walked me back to the parking garage when I left at 9:30, I shouldn't have been walking in that neighborhood by myself at night, but, whatcha gonna do.) Everything was pretty straightforward: answer the phones with the computer (you wore a headset so you can hear the caller), take the information if they wanted to do it via credit card, give them the address if they wanted to mail a cheque, refer them to the 866-GET-INFO line if they needed other information (they were calling 800-HELP-NOW to get the donations line, which was what we were running). And I figured, this isn't all that different from what I do every day at work in the call center. Of course, this was anything but "business as usual."
More than once I was emotionally overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. Whether it was five thousand dollars or fifteen, everyone said that they wished they could give more, and some by their own admission could barely afford what they were donating already. If everyone in the country gave even one dollar, just think of how much that could do. I took a donation from a woman in Mississippi who wanted her money to go specifically to those in Louisiana because, even though her house had also been hit, she said it was nothing compared with those poor people and she counted herself profoundly blessed. And I lost count of how many people said, you know what, I don't have a lot of money, but I do have a house with a roof overhead, and a pantry full of food, and I am more than willing to open my heart and my home to the millions of displaced victims.
What was truly amazing was to find out that, with the people I was working with, they maxed out their system TWICE during the day with the messages received --- once while I was there, and once before I had arrived that afternoon --- and their system can take up to 15,000 messages before it has to be reset. What's more, the lines become "busy" after a while, if there are too many calls waiting in queue, to give the call centers time to catch up on the ones in queue, which also happened twice. Plus even though the lines were supposedly cut off for this call center at 8:30 CDT, there were still calls coming in at 9:30 when I finally left... people who waited in queue over an hour waiting to donate over the phone.
Those seven hours went by so much faster than the four hours at work doing essentially the same thing for an insurance company, but there's nothing surprising about that.
