Recent happenings

I have been forgetting to take my camera ANYwhere this past month so these next few "catch-up" posts are going to be sadly devoid of art.

Recent happenings:

-Fellow VISTA Maureen and I have joined the Hunger Task Force! Don't you love it? A task force. I feel like a superhero.

-Lately, I feel like I've gotten some good leads from a couple of sites following Ohio Benefit Bank presentations: Maumee Valley Habitat for Humanity, a substance abuse treatment center called Fresh Attitudes, and Washington Local School District.

I'm especially excited about the possibility of Washington Local becoming an OBB site because that could have especially far-reaching consequences for the community. I met one of their high school social workers at a community resource fair. We met with her and a school administrator and they plan to start with the one social worker at the high school and see how it works within the system. If it works, it could go into all the junior highs and elementaries as well. yay!

- I had a somewhat stressful training a couple weeks ago. Something came up and the place it was originally set to be held had to retract the room space after I'd already had people sign up for the class. So I had to find a new location to train.

Luckily I found a place easy enough, but that had its own problems. The morning of the class, I had trouble with the computer passwords. The lab they wanted me to use wouldn't let me on the Internet no matter which password I tried to enter.

So we moved to another computer lab.

Which was good because more people showed up than had registered, so they wouldn't have all fit in the other lab anyway, which would have been cramped enough with just the number who were supposed to be there.

However, once we started up the class, we ran into some technical difficulties. Basically, the OBB software wouldn't let us past one of the first screen. I called the help desk but it's apparently some kind of glitch they encounter occassionally that they can't do anything about.

He said the only thing we could try was to log out and log back in again, but that didn't work. Or we could try creating a whole new client and starting over. I was loathe to try that solution, because as any community trainer can attest to, logging in is the most timeconsuming and confusing part of the training for new counselors. And some of the people in the class were slow with computers. It had taken them long enough the first time, so I was groaning inside.

But we tried it anyway and it didn't work. One guy, who seemed to be easily annoyed, was getting kind of annoyed and wanting to come back to a different training day.

I don't know if it was something about those computers or what (I'd never trained there before) or just an occasional glitch that could have happened anywhere, but I'd never had that happen before.

Finally I just had them all double up with another person because a few of them had gotten through for some reason. So instead of one scenario by themselves and one with a partner, we did both scenarios with partners.

It all ended up OK and most people were patient, but it wasn't the most fun training ever.