1961, Candlestick Park, Major League Baseball All Star Game. Pitcher Stu Miller winds up, one leg high in the air — and a gust of wind blows him right off the mound.
2020, Bayview/Hunter’s Point, a dozen blocks away from Candlestick. UCSF is running a study comparing the rate of infection in different neighborhoods in SF. Bolinas, the Mission, and now Bayview. The study is sponsored by Zuckerberg Hospital and the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Bayview is of particular interest because of the high density of unhoused people who live in the community.
Alternatively, a neighborhood organization (United in Health D10) is throwing a block party to help as many people get tested as possible. A DJ is playing old R&B throwbacks — Staying Alive, Bobby Brown. A local barbeque joint is cooking up cheeseburgers and later, it’s promised, there will be chicken.
Depends on how you want to look at it. Either way, the wind is blowing fiercely. White canvas tents are set up on the street like it’s a farmer’s market. The canvases are flapping around wildly. So are the orange signs that number the tents, and so are the nametags of the volunteers. My favorite parts of the day were mad sprints to reacquire small bits of paper, nametags or fliers or consent forms, that the wind was trying to abscond with.
I was a volunteer at the event. The four volunteer roles (unskilled):
-Interviewer, who reads questions from a script and notes the answers
-Labeller, who writes notes about which person took which test and affixes them to the ziploc bags containing people’s blood and nose swabs. Probably the most skilled unskilled labor thanks to the good-handwriting requirement.
-Greeter, who waves a flag to signal that the interviewer is ready for a new interviewee, and gives the interviewee a gift bag after they’re done. This is the one I was randomly assigned to be.
-Line manager, who escorts people from the entrance to whichever Greeter they see waving a flag.
They told us by email to get there at 7, and on the mandatory training Zoom, they told us to get there at 7:30. I got there at 7:30 and they announced the in-person training would start at 8. Cest la volunteer vie. I remind myself that they closed volunteer signups because they had enough people. I’m lucky that I was chosen, or smart to apply early or whatever, but either way, I have zero marginal volunteer product.
The in-person Greeter training: a woman tells us the ropes. We are guests in a community not our own, and although we may be viewed with suspicion (especially the phlebotomists, who are in what she calls “bunny suits”), we are to above all treat everyone with respect.
The biggest thing I learned from the in-person training was that we’re effectively [incentivizing/paying/bribing] people to get tested, not just with the offer of a free meal from the restaurant, but with the gift bags, which contain not only a cloth mask but a $10 Visa gift card essentially equivalent to cash. Again, this seems totally appropriate — the physical testing process is uncomfortable (a cotton swab halfway up the nose; those of us who have taken the test are encouraged to relay our own experiences to make it sound not that bad even though it kinda is), and the pretest interview is time-consuming (20 min, in heat + wind), and the benefit to society of getting all this information is presumably pretty big. So why not kick back some of that societal benefit to the people who are making it happen? It just surprised me.
We get T-shirts. I stick mine in my backpack, then stick it on over the shirt I wore to the event when I realize that wearing the shirts is one way to visually distinguish volunteers from non. We’re assigned to our tents. I’m at a mid-single-digit tent. I practice flag motions. An understated underhand wave, an exuberant overhead swing. Another Greeter at a table four down from me does a left-right chop. I mimic it, then do a baseball swing which he mimics. Spooky conversation at a distance.
For the first two hours, very few people show up. One of the two interviewers at my tent practice-interviews me. He’s chill, he’s from Eritrea by way of the Midwest and wants to be a pharmaceutical researcher. The other interviewer is, like most of the volunteers, UCSF affiliated. I find UCSF nearly impossible to say correctly out loud because it sounds so much like USCF = United States Chess Federation which magazine I had a subscription to when I was a kid. Anyways, the other interviewer annoys me a little because she keeps talking about how much she’s been to [African country]. It’s all good though, we all made time to be here so we’re all Good for the day.
My flag-waving pays off. We have our first community member come to the tent, to be interviewed & tested. He’s jovial, grateful for the opportunity. A model participant. I direct him to the Midwestern interviewer. The labeller springs into action, delighted to have something to do.
A second participant, a woman, is ushered to our table. But she says she has symptoms. I spring into action — this is another one of my duties, to take people with symptoms over to the symptom tent. It’s very exciting to me anytime a situation I was told about in training actually comes up.
A third participant is ushered to our table by the line manager. This guy’s a lot more uncertain and nervous. It’s [African country] interviewer’s turn this time. Despite my finding her annoying, I have to admit she’s really good at putting him at ease.
Now that our table is full, I can sit down and take a flag break. The first interview wraps up. Someone higher-ranking than us, bench press/deadlift body but named Stacy, comes to check on how it went. “The questions about living situation were confusing,” says the Eritrean, because this guy was housed…”
“He was unhoused?” says Stacy.
“No, not unhoused, like he had a home and everything.” Growing pains of a new linguistic framework. We never really had a word that meant the opposite of “homeless” anyway. “Homed”?
Even though things are slow, few people have their phones out, in case things speed up rapidly, because there might be Covid floating around and people don’t want it to get on their screens, and because they feel social pressure from the first two items in this paragraph. And the people being screened don’t have their phones out either.
Instead, volunteers are chatting with each other. That’s basically why I volunteered — to have a socially acceptable excuse to talk to strangers for a bit. These conversations have very much the norms of online chats from this century’s first decade: freewheeling, fun due to the newness of the form, and most of all, tolerant of asynchronicity. Conversations between volunteers care liable to be interrupted at any time by someone who needs something, and it’s totally acceptable to break off mid-sentence just like it would be to not respond to a message for a while with no explanation because someone knocked on your door or you got a phone call an email or just got bored. Then you can pick back up the threads later, or not.
The customer is always king, and at these events, the people who are getting tested are the customers. During one of the first interviews, the interviewer called over a high-ranking person to help out something. The person comes over, the interviewer starts to explanation the situation like “so, blah blah blah,” but the high-ranking person ignores the interviewer for 3 seconds and first says to the interviewee “Hi! How’s it going? What’s your name?” and only then deals with the interviewer’s question. I was struck by how striking I found it to see the theoretically lower-status person get addressed first. Totally smart idea of course. Must have been part of her training.
I amused myself by wondering how many levels of meta-training must have gone into the planning of this event. The person who trained us had been trained in how to give trainings to volunteers. And I’m betting that the trainer trainer had themselves been trained by someone else. The diffusion of information is a beautiful thing. Knowledge graph, not in the sense that facts are connected to other facts, but people connected to other people.
When the testing is done, I give out gift bags, which we’re keeping in a nondescript black trash bag inside the tent. I’m surprised by the skepticism I feel when I hand them over. It feels like people feel like it’s a scam or a trick. Still, it’s my job. When the labeler steps on my turf by handing out a gift bag I feel perversely annoyed. I’m also annoyed when the table next to us gets more attention from the line managers. Is it my flag-waving that’s at fault? I resolve to shake it more eloquently. I can’t let my tent down.
But these feelings won’t stop me from behaving professionally, in accordance with instructions, correctly. The nice thing about volunteering like this is that your interactions with the public are prescribed. The terrifying essay question of how to act is reduced to multiple choice, and if you pay enough attention to the teacher, you can get 100%.
12:30. Pizza comes, for the volunteers. I brought my own food just in case. I end up eating my own food and the pizza. We can finally take our masks off for a bit. We have 30 minutes of uninterrupted small talk.
1PM. The new shift of volunteers arrives. My crew trains our successors. One more link in the knowledge graph. We depart without ceremony. Quick goodbyes only, the way I like. I walk around the neighborhood a little. The streets are lined with parked cars with people in them. I wonder whether the people live in the cars or whether that’s just the social scene there.
It was a good day. We processed eight people at the tent. That’s eight people who will either have peace of mind, or a two-week all-expenses-paid stay in the Isolation and Quarantine Hotel. I get home and tell my partner about my day. I don’t have any photos of the event for her, but I do have a Google Maps screenshot selfie of me as a blue dot. She points out that I have a big mask tan on my face, two pale white stripes on my face where the mask straps were.
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