September 22, 2005
Dear Everyone:
Living on the West Coast, we don’t think about hurricanes much. Except now.
It’s not just that
CNN won’t shut up about it.
Two days after
Katrina
hit, Company had a complete website up and had already arranged with a
financial company in
They named it “
Compare that with the Shrub in the White House and his cronies, all trying to figure out which end is up. To paraphrase Rumsfield: “You come to a disaster with the government you have, not with the government you’d like to have.”
Now, with
Hurricane Rita
bearing down on
They evacuated and shut down all the “xxx facilities”, shut down those “other facilities” that hadn’t been shut down before for Katrina, and closed all the offices yesterday. Told everyone to “head for the hills and call this 800 number when you get there so we know you’re OK.” Don’t come back to work until we tell you to.
They did decide to keep the data center in “Hobby”
up and running, since many people who’ve never even been to “Hobby” (or
the
Speaking of flooding, do you know what to do if you have truly important papers that, for whatever reason, get wet? Answer: Pop them in the freezer. Once paper gets wet, it begins to grow mold within 24 hours. Once frozen, the paper can remain in that condition indefinitely. If they’re important papers, but you don’t need to do anything with them, just keep them in the freezer.
If you do need to recover the papers, and you have patience and time, lay the papers, preferably in single sheets, on shelves inside a frost free freezer. The way a frost free freezer works is this: At regular intervals, the freezer shuts down. The ice crystals inside the freezer begin to melt. A vacuum automatically sucks the melting water out of the freezer. Then the freezer comes back on for a time until the whole process repeats. This is why, if you leave a tray of ice cubes in the freezer too long, the cubes turn into tiny ice nuggets.
Wet papers, in a frost free freezer, work the same way. The water on the paper turns into ice crystals. Gradually, the freezer freeze-dries the papers until there’s no water left. The pages may be kind of warped in places, but that’s all.
One of the advantages of being in the Records Management business: You pick up useful bits of knowledge like that. As for how a frost free freezer works, I found that out when my last refrigerator suddenly stopped working: The fuse that controls the timing had burned out.
No Letter next week.
“Jeannie” and I leave for
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. For
those who don’t know “Gerald”, he’s brother “Byron’s” second son, thus
our nephew. Mother’s first
grandchild to get married.
P.
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