Blushing For The Deadbeats Here

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air
----Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Once again I have saved the day for a number of veterans here at the shelter. Yes, I WILL be punished for it, but that’s just the price one pays for being a superhero.

Back in July, my shelter Money Management teacher, Ms. Light, arranged for a bunch of us veterans to get a discount on the $200 filing fee for applying for bankruptcy. Ms. Light is a LAUSD junior high teacher who makes extra money in the evenings coming over here to the vets hall to teach us pea brains how to balance a checkbook or read a Dick and Jane primer. She worked a deal where us homeless vets could apply for bankruptcy for a total of just $55. The catch was that the bankruptcy forms had to be typewritten.

There’s the rub. This multimillion dollar nonprofit corporation we live in could not loosen up enough funds to buy one typewriter for the vets to use. “Would not” loosen up the funds is a more appropriate phrase. Whenever Ms. Light asked L.A. Vets to help, they said that the facility had all these donated computers in the computer room and the vets would just have to use those.

The problem is, you just can’t stick a bankruptcy form into the computer floppy drive and have it print on top of the form. L.A. Vets told Ms. Light that there were some very highly paid computer “experts” in the computer center and that they could figure out how to scan in the bankruptcy documents to the computers.

Trouble was, the computer center here has no scanners and L.A.Vets refused to buy one. If somebody donated one, that would be fine, L.A. Vets officials said (except that if someone actually donated a scanner, it would be spirited away to one of the administrators’ desks, I can ASSURE you of THAT!).

In August, after a month of pleading with L.A. Vets to get up off its ass and do something--- anything--- to help, Ms. Light finally found someone, me, a resident of L.A. vets, who owned a scanner and had all the bankruptcy pages scanned in to tiff files. She took those tiff files to the highly paid computer “experts” in the computer room and those guys informed her that there was no way to translate those tiff files into editable text.

You have to understand the nepotism and cronyism around here to understand THAT fallacious statement.

Computer room “techie’ is supposed to be a dick job where you hide in the IT room reading Juggs magazines, drinking coffee and surfing all the internet sites which are filtered out from the computers available to the resident veterans.

A computer room techie is not supposed to actually know how to fix something. I can practically hear those L.A. Vets computer room “administrators” groaning when I then told Ms. Light that yes, indeed, you CAN translate tiffs into editable text using OCR software.

Again, the computer room “techs” told her that L.A. Vets owned no Optical Character Reading software and again L.A. Vets refused to release funds for it. Again, Ms. Light searched and found a resident vet, this one a V.I.P. who had just come in off the street and gotten himself a job right away, who was willing to buy some OCR software for the good of all us deadbeats. That would be me again.

Ms. Light presented the OCR software to the computer room IT employees late in August, expecting that they would be good as their word at “getting on this right away.”

By mid-September, when nothing had been done, the IT do-nothings told Ms. Light they needed text-bridge software to make the project work. Ms. Light, not knowing better, believed them and asked L.A. Vets for funds for text-bridge software. After L.A. Vets plead poverty, she got yet another homeless vet to pony up the funds out of his own pocket.

All this time I’m in V.I.P. fighting other battles with various representatives of the L.A. Vets status quo. Fighting the institutional racism against whites. Fighting the ineptitude of a system that hires only drug-recovering blacks to run the place. Fighting the system.

Flash forward to last week. The computer room “techs” STILL hadn’t done the bankruptcy project for Ms. Light. Five months after Ms. Light began trying to do something for us veterans, L.A. vets could still not get the job done. The computer room “employees” were telling her that it was a very complicated problem that would probably take several more months to solve.

Liars. Bums. Lazy bureaucrats.

I got tired of waiting. Besides, now that I’m in G.P., I have my computer set up. So on a Wednesday night, I decided to look at the problem . . . on my computer, not those shabbily maintenanced PCs down in the computer room. Two hours later, my roommate Antony heard me exclaim, “Eureka! I’m a genius!”

I figured it out. Those ‘geniuses’ down in IT had overcomplicated the problem. The next day, I told the computer “techs” that I was taking over the project. They were glad to be rid of the troublesome thing, grinning at me because they thought I didn’t know what I was getting in to. They offered me their computer files on what they had done so far in five months, but I said no thanks. All I needed was the blank bankruptcy papers.

They looked at me as if I was insane, but gave me the papers. If this bozo wants to start all the way back at scratch , I read off their faces, let him go ahead and try, the chump.

The next morning I handed the lead IT guy a CD.

“Done,” I said.

“What’s done?” he asked.

“The bankruptcy file,” I said, “All 35 pages, editable in Microsoft Word for PCs.”

“There were 35 pages?” he asked.

“Done. Complete. Ready to roll. I did it all at work last night. Will you give this to Ms. Light when she comes in tonight? I’ve got a security guard job and I have to work again tonight.”

The IT “manager” looked at me incredulously. He grabbed the CD and loaded it in to his computer. He opened up my work in Microsoft Word. There was the bankruptcy document, in its entirety, editable in MS Word.

I will be punished for this. L.A. Vets does not soon forget such rogue behavior. This is a facility of failure, not of success.

Tags: Department of Veterans Affairs, homeless veterans, veterans shelter, homeless, unfathomed caves, deadbeats, Thomas Gray, superhero, Money Management, LAUSD, bankruptcy, pea brains, 501c, nonprofit corporation, scanners, L.A. Vets, U.S. Vets, lazy bureaucrats, idiot techies, tech support, dick job, nepotism, cronyism, IT, Juggs magazine, OCR software, institutional racism, inept tech support, overcomplicating the problem, text editable, rogue behavior, jarvis, marquisdejolie