Thursday and another trip to NOLA

On Thursday Chris and Sara went to the NOLA office to bring to the BTR office. I loaded up the small boxtruck and took their orders to them. First I want to say that the order for West Jeff was 5 totes. 5 fucking (excuse my language) totes. This was maybe a 10th of the order I had placed the day before. I called Robin to see what the hell happened. I talked to their operations manager and she told me that since I had placed the order so late in the day, they would have had to keep people overtime to fill the order. Plus I hadn't gotten all the billing info right so until they knew what department to bill, they couldn't send the rest of the order. They sent NO NARCOTICS and NO DIABETIC MEDS. This was the part W Jeff needed the most. Ochsner had 2 pallets. I wonder how much this had to do with the fact that W Jeff got some of their drugs from McKesson, a rival drug company, and Ochsner got all of their meds from Robin. HMM, makes you wonder, doesn't it?

I drove down and saw buses still sitting on the side of the road that hadn't gone into the city yet. I got so aggravated seeing that. I drove into the city. I saw a few National Guard guys, but not the amount that was needed to control the city. The Salvation Army was handing out hot meals, people were still looting - alcohol mostly, though I saw a few people with loaves of bread. When I got to Ochsner, they were still doing fine despite the fact that it was hot in most of the hospital. They were still getting their supplies from the Sav A Center warehouse across the street. They had pallets of dog food, water, canned food, and trash bags. The orderly guys took the supplies upstairs for me so I didn't have to do it by myself. The guy in the warehouse told me that the National Guard should be there the next day to set up a guard. That was reassuring because the locals were coming very near the hospital because they were not satisfied with the Salvation Army truck and no operating drug dealers.

I headed across the river to W Jeff.

The end of Wednesday

I felt like I hadn't done enough, but I was unsure on what else I could do. I wanted to go right back down to NOLA with the returns from any other customer that was not open in BTR. I wanted to rob the Wal Mart for them, and I was worried about Charity and Memorial. It seemed unlikely that the hospitals had been evacuated when nothing else in the city was working the way that it was supposed to work. We didn't see anything that led us to believe the military or FEMA had entered the area beyond the few people we saw It wasn't fair that to all the people trapped in the city and at the hospitals, salvation was 70 miles up I-10. The problem was they had no way to get there. We saw buses lined up along I-10 just outside of Baton Rouge and Laplace. Why weren't they in the city rescuing people? I still don't understand the governor or the mayor. I guarantee you if I was a government leader, I would have commandeered whatever I needed, especially if I was the governor. I would have had the National Guard waiting in Alexandria and I would have sent every schoolbus I could get ahold of on Tuesday morning, not Thursday or Friday, when she finally did something. I would not have been on TV crying begging Bush to send help. They might as well have held hands and sung kumbaya or some shit like that as all the good the crying did. Sorry, I digress. I felt so drained after my day in NOLA. I had fire ant bites on my legs, I stunk from the diesel and god knows what else in the water. I was hungry and tired and wanted to do more. I think Chris and I went to Golden Corral to eat, but neither of us had much of an appetite. We were praying that Robin, the pharmaceutical company, would send the drugs that were so desperately needed in NOLA.

I called Lisa that night and told her everything that had happened - she was really worried about me being in the city, but understood it was my job.