Rita Watch: Advisory 3

The place I work had hired about 100 temporary employees to handle telephone disaster unemployment claims from Louisiana for Hurricane Katrina. We have just this week seen the call volume drop a little. Management was going to lay off all the temps today. Rita changed their mind. They've decided to keep the temps on and train them on taking Texas unemployment claims. That's where I come in.

Our regular training for CSRs is 8.5 days long. That's work days, mind you. So, if we trained them in our normal way, they wouldn't be ready to take calls until about the end of September. I got the assignment today to whittle our regular training down to just the basics for taking a claim. We need to have them taking calls on Monday. See, it's like this. If you want to file for Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA) you have to apply for regular Unemployment Insurance (UI) first. DUA will pay only when you're not eligible for regular UI. That's why we're having to train these temps in how to take a Texas claim. Three days training to send out millions of dollars. I'm not kidding - we paid out 1.9 billion dollars in 2004.

I heard on the news tonight that Hurricane Rita will still be a hurricane when it reaches Austin. That means that winds will be 75 mph at a minimum. We heard to store up water, and be prepared to go without electricity for 48 hours. What?! The Goddess without air conditioning? 48 hours?! Six people and six dogs and no air conditioning? Somebody send me some Rohypnol! I don't want to use it to rape anyone, I want to check out until it's all over.