Here we have a funny post from a special guest. A friend of mine, Don is a writer, teacher and former journalist who used to work at Planet Aid too. In my next post I will discuss my training to go to Africa, the other managers in training I met hailing from all over the country, and the weirdness of inhabiting a Teacher’s Group school up in the Berkshires. Enjoy this entry.

                                                Planet Aid NJ

                                                By Donald M. Kelly

   The Planet Aid New Jersey distribution center was set far back from River Road, where the municipal border of Clifton touches Route 21. The location was a good one for a distribution center with the task of collecting, bundling and shipping recycled clothing. Route 21 not only connected to most major highways in Northern New Jersey, but linked the two former industrial centers, Paterson and Newark.

Seventy years ago, the River Road area was still rural and the outlines of agriculture could still be made out in the terrain. Grass and weeds persistently broke through the randomly maintained sidewalks and parking areas. Nature manifested herself in strange ways such as the massive, elegant spiral orb spider’s web I passed every day that hung resiliently between a stop sign and the grounding cable of a telephone pole. I often wondered, observing the islands of green amid the crushed curbs and pot holed roads, if the vegetation was planning to rise up and consume the office parks and warehouses in one vengeful stroke.

My interview was with the Planet Aid regional director Jostein.  The position required me to convince municipalities and private business owners to accept new donation bins on their property.

Like Planet Aid itself, Jostein originated in Norway, a fact he told me during our interview. I was glad he did. I was having trouble placing (and understanding) his accent. And like many Americans, the facts I knew about Norwegians amounted to:

1.)    Norwegians are Scandinavians.

2.)    Henrik Ibsen was a famous Norwegian (playwright and father of realism).

3.)    All Norwegians sound like the Swedish Chef on “The Muppet Show.” Herdy-verdy, chickie-wickie... 

The sincerity of purpose in Planet Aid’s mission was at a level I was unused to in the American business world. The profit motive is everything in our country. Ten years as a journalist had taught me that anyone claiming another consideration besides personal gain, in any endeavor, was either naïve or a criminal. I accepted the job anyway, being painfully under employed in an economy preparing to hurtle itself off a cliff and into the 2008 recession.

     

The open space you crossed to get to the Planet Aid office, called “a parking lot,” had been paved and repaved alternately with cement and asphalt. At the start of the 21^st century, it looked like it had taken heavy mortar fire. The tiny, dusty, rectangular office I shared not only with Jostein and my friend Phil Perry, but also the administrative staff, was squeezed painfully into one corner to give the delivery and storage as much room as possible. The operations manager was a black haired woman named Alma. Not an unattractive woman, Alma was skulking bitterly through her late forties, fawning up to her superiors and tyrannizing the other employees. Tact and diplomacy had eluded her management style was she was referred to as “The Warden” even by outside truckers who did once a week pick ups from the center.

People liked our secretary, Isabel, is direct proportion to their dislike for Alma. When not mocking Alma behind her back, the truck drivers and warehouse workers hit on Isabel at every opportunity. You could tell she loved male attention, but juggling single motherhood and a complex love life caused her to deflect the passes that came her way.

Needless to say, it was pleasant to be around Isabel. Often, she would have lunch with Phil and me. If I hadn’t, at the time, been seeing a woman I felt strongly about, I would have joined my co-workers flinging daily compliments Isabel’s way.

Planet Aid subcontracted pick ups and deliveries to five independent truck owners. Of all of them Kevin, resident of nearby Kearny, city of my parental ancestors, remains vivid in my memory, because he was always angry. Peevishness consumed him like a permanent, low grade fever. Subjects of his grumbling ranged from the crazed homeless people who lived in the donation bins he had to empty to incompetent fellow workers to his disintegrating marriage. And it was his domestic life that caused one of his more memorable headaches at Planet Aid.

Early on a Tuesday morning, Kevin departed to collect a large donation of clothes and books near the Jersey-Pennsylvania border. Alone in the office five hours later, I made the error of taking an incoming call. “Get me the hell out of here!” an enraged Kevin said.

I quickly learned that during a routine traffic stop for a defective back up light, a check of Kevin’s license revealed an outstanding warrant for a year old moving violation. Despite loud professions of ignorance in the matter, Kevin was transported to the local jail and his vehicle impounded. Quickly, I alerted Jostein, who leapt into the company’s delivery van and raced to bail out Kevin. Three hours later, a second, even angrier call came from Kevin. In a tone described by Isabel, who answered that time, described as “urgent,” Kevin wanted to know where Jostein was with the bail. The office cell phone was handed from person to person, all of us reluctant to deal with the outraged truck driver. Eventually Isabel told Kevin the truth: we had heard nothing from Jostein since he departed in the delivery van.

“He drove that piece of crap!” exploded from the ear piece, loud fragments of Kevin’s voice ricocheting off the plywood walls. “Now I am screwed!”

And so Kevin was. On the rural outskirts of Lake Hopatcong, the van overheated with no warning. A cloud of black smoke and steam erupted from the engine, blotting out Jostein’s vision of the road ahead. This encumbrance, paired with the loss of the breaks, caused the van to collide with a roadside tomato stand.  One eye witness, the stand operator, stated the singed man who emerged from the ruined van ranted loudly in a strange language that reminded him the Amish.

“I don’t know what he was saying,” he added, according to police reports. “But I know he was using words my mother always told us not to use around nice people.”

Of course, Kevin spent the night behind bars and was freed the next afternoon. The original ticket had been issued to Kevin’s wife, who had driven on a sidewalk in an effort to park as close as possible to her manicurist in Belleville. She neglected to tell her husband about the ticket