09 November 2001
Donate Your Blankets!
I forgot to post this email from someone at work yesterday. I have "anonymized" the details to protect the guilty. Or something like that. I have not corrected the atrocious grammar.
If you do, would like to donate it to the Afghan people.
[Name Omitted] has a way to get them to Afghanistan.
If you have a blanket that you would like to donate, bring it in Tomorrow only.
You can drop them by [Name Omitted]'s office on the first floor in the [Name Omitted] department.
This is for tomorrow only. So bring in your spare blankets..
thanks a mil, Winter is setting in, and I'm sure they could use the blankets.
[Name Omitted]
PS: don't forget the holidays are coming. I'm working on my annual email asking for donations for our Holiday collection.
The woman who sent out this email is, interestingly, the chief ITP at the local office, and apparently that does not keep her NEARLY busy enough, because she seems constantly to be pestering people to donate to this charity or that. I don't mean to belittle people who are legitimately involved with charitable work, but I DO mean to belittle people like this woman who are so busy making sure everyone knows they are "do-gooders" that very little good is actually done. In this case, the notion of sending a worn-out blanket to people who will never see it (thanks to their corrupt rulers) instead of helping out any of Houston's many unsung and underappreciated local charities is par for the course. Helping some of those organizations might actually involve anonymous work, the kind that charities desperately need but that doesn't draw much attention.
I wish I could reproduce some misplaced emails I've gotten from this woman in the past, lest anyone think I'm being too hard on her, because she has a pattern of "charitable" attention-seeking. The best example came either a year or two ago, when she decided she would start either a Thanksgiving or Christmas collection for a Houston homeless person. She sent out all sorts of pestering emails haranguing people, and extolling the dire straits of Houston's homeless. And after she had gathered all sorts of crap from people, she sent out an email announcing that she had not actually been able to FIND any homeless person in Houston to give all the crap to, so she was going to donate it to Goodwill or some such organization!
Now, I don't want to give the impression there are no homeless people in Houston. It's not even that hard to find them. One fellow I call the Sage of Montrose is regularly seen on Montrose between West Gray and Westheimer. And evidence of the homeless is readily apparent under the bridges of Buffalo Bayou just west of downtown. But of course, in order to know these things, one actually has to poke around a bit, and involve oneself in the community. Any number of charitable people and organizations could point a truly concerned person in the right direction. But the charitable "attention-seekers" will always move on to their next self-aggrandizing project before it comes to that. And that is annoying.
Needless to say, I did not bring this idiotic woman a blanket today. I didn't get the impression that anyone was stuck on the moon, after all.
[Posted @ 09:20 AM CST]
