In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the City of Long Beach, California, set up five drive-through testing sites across the city.
In May, Mayor Robert Garcia gushed about the importance of the sites: “Having a robust testing capacity is crucial to keeping people safe and gradually reopening the Long Beach economy,” he said.
But when my son and I attempted to actually get a test at one of the Long Beach sites, we found the process so frustrating that we nearly gave up.
My son needed a Covid-19 test before starting his summer job as a camp counselor. The city encouraged people wanting a test to make an appointment, but on my first try there were zero time slots available. That was partly because the scheduling only seemed to allow appointments about a week ahead of time.
I had better luck on my second try, a few days later. I was able to schedule an appointment on June 27 at 3:30 p.m. at Jordan High School. I received a confirmation email with a reservation number.
The day before the appointment, we received a voicemail saying our tests had been moved to Veterans Stadium, at the same time. This was good, because the site was closer to us.
When we arrived at Veterans Stadium the next day, about 3:15, the parking lot was dotted with orange cones marking driving lanes and a few pop-up tents. But something was amiss: There were no people there and the gate was locked.
We did see six other occupied cars lined up at the gate and took our place in line. We were confused, but hopeful that somebody would show up soon to do tests.
After about 10 minutes, a man drove up and told all of us that our tests had been moved to a different site, the Long Beach Community College campus on Pacific Coast Highway. We headed off and arrived at the other site in about 10 minutes.
But the scene there was disturbingly reminiscent of the one at Veterans Stadium: Lines of traffic cones and a few tents, but no people. We saw a security guard and asked where the testers were.
"They closed up at 2 o'clock," he said.
Frustrated, we wondered if this test -- even though free -- was worth the trouble.
Still, we returned the Long Beach City College site the next morning, encountering a long line of cars snaking through the lot. I'd estimate there were about 80 cars there.
When we pulled in at about 9:45 a.m., a woman worker asked if we had an appointment and I told her, "Yes — yesterday. But there was no one here." This puzzled her, but after we explained, she directed us into a line.
We sat still for about a half hour, then our line started to move and at about 10:25, we got to the check-in station. I showed the woman there our appointment confirmation number and she was confused, and sought help. Soon a man arrived and tried to tell us we had to go to Jordan High. I explained what had happened, and he said they would have to enter my son's info "manually."
To be clear, all the workers there were super nice and did their best to help us. Still, I was surprised they had no way to access my son's information, which I'd entered online.
So we had to pull out of line, and a different man wrote down my son's information. This delayed us about 10 minutes.
Then we pulled ahead to the testing station. A woman came to our window and gave my son a testing kit. This revealed another confusing part of the process. Our email confirmation had included a link to a video showing how to do the test. It instructed you to rub the test swab inside both cheeks, inside the bottom and top of your lips, underneath and the top of your tongue, and finally, the roof of your mouth.
But the woman at the site instructed my son differently: He was to put the swab up his nose as deep as he could without pain, and rub it around for 10 seconds in each nostril. So that's what he did.
He described it as very uncomfortable — his eyes watered — but not painful. Then he placed the swab in a test vial as instructed, place the cap on, and returned it to the woman. We were done about 10:40, slightly less than an hour after arriving.
Now we wait for the results, which are supposed to arrive in about 72 hours.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Book review: "In the Wake of Madness" by Joan Druett
It says a lot about the job options available to young American men in the first half of the 19th century that so many of them opted to work on a whaling ship. Sure, you would get to travel the world and visit idyllic South Seas islands, but, as Joan Druett illustrates in "In the Wake of Madness" it would have been a grim career path, and possibly a hellish one.
In this 2003 book, Druett tells the story of the whaleship Sharon, and its seemingly cursed voyage of 1841 to 1845. Two men were brutally murdered on the trip, while other men died in accidents. The captain harshly put down an attempted mutiny, and most of the crew eventually deserted the ship at various ports of call.
Sound like a downer? Far from it: It is a fascinating story of life on a whaleship and the varied men — some brave, some cowardly, some cruel — that inhabited it.
While "In the Wake of Madness" revolves around the two murders, that's not the key to its compelling story. After all, if you're interested in homicide, there are countless true crime books to choose from. What sets Druett's book apart is that she places you on the whaleboat, amid the salty air, the dank smells of the cramped cabins, the sweat and blood of the men who lived and worked together without break.
Druett does this even while acknowledging that her primary sources are flawed and fragmented. She relied on the diaries of sailors as key sources of information, but at times they were are cryptic or mute. To fill in the spaces, she pulls from documents from other whaleships, news reports of the time, and accounts from authors like Herman Melville.
Druett makes it clear that while the trip of Sharon was particularly snakebitten, the work on any whaleship was often miserable and conflict-ridden. I suppose that's not too surprising when you have men living in close contact for years, never getting a full night's sleep (they swapped shifts every four hours around the clock), and pushed to the brink in extreme conditions.
No one asked me, but I've got to wonder how much trouble could have been avoided if the owners of the Sharon and the other whaleships would have put more time into selecting and training their men before the voyage even began. As Druett describes it, it was common at the time to take virtually any man with a pulse on board, regardless of whether he had any experience at sea or any skills at all.
So suddenly you're deep into a three- or four-year voyage and you realize that your crew is unqualified and possibly unwilling. It's also possible, as with the Sharon, that the captain himself was not up to the task.
One of the biggest problems on the Sharon was that the harpooners repeatedly missed the whale or threw so weakly the implement easily fell out of the target. Here's an idea: Hire better harpooners, or train them before you leave home. It might cost you a bit more upfront but it would have greatly increased the success of the journey and your ship would return more quickly with a full load of whale oil.
If you like this book, I would recommend, "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick, another story of a whaleboat trip that went very wrong.
In this 2003 book, Druett tells the story of the whaleship Sharon, and its seemingly cursed voyage of 1841 to 1845. Two men were brutally murdered on the trip, while other men died in accidents. The captain harshly put down an attempted mutiny, and most of the crew eventually deserted the ship at various ports of call.
Sound like a downer? Far from it: It is a fascinating story of life on a whaleship and the varied men — some brave, some cowardly, some cruel — that inhabited it.
While "In the Wake of Madness" revolves around the two murders, that's not the key to its compelling story. After all, if you're interested in homicide, there are countless true crime books to choose from. What sets Druett's book apart is that she places you on the whaleboat, amid the salty air, the dank smells of the cramped cabins, the sweat and blood of the men who lived and worked together without break.
Druett does this even while acknowledging that her primary sources are flawed and fragmented. She relied on the diaries of sailors as key sources of information, but at times they were are cryptic or mute. To fill in the spaces, she pulls from documents from other whaleships, news reports of the time, and accounts from authors like Herman Melville.
Druett makes it clear that while the trip of Sharon was particularly snakebitten, the work on any whaleship was often miserable and conflict-ridden. I suppose that's not too surprising when you have men living in close contact for years, never getting a full night's sleep (they swapped shifts every four hours around the clock), and pushed to the brink in extreme conditions.
No one asked me, but I've got to wonder how much trouble could have been avoided if the owners of the Sharon and the other whaleships would have put more time into selecting and training their men before the voyage even began. As Druett describes it, it was common at the time to take virtually any man with a pulse on board, regardless of whether he had any experience at sea or any skills at all.
So suddenly you're deep into a three- or four-year voyage and you realize that your crew is unqualified and possibly unwilling. It's also possible, as with the Sharon, that the captain himself was not up to the task.
One of the biggest problems on the Sharon was that the harpooners repeatedly missed the whale or threw so weakly the implement easily fell out of the target. Here's an idea: Hire better harpooners, or train them before you leave home. It might cost you a bit more upfront but it would have greatly increased the success of the journey and your ship would return more quickly with a full load of whale oil.
If you like this book, I would recommend, "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick, another story of a whaleboat trip that went very wrong.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Book review: "After Further Review" by Mike Pereira
There are a lot of things wrong with the book "After Further Review" — it's poorly organized and the writing is amateurish, just to name a couple. Still, I really liked it.
"After Further Review" is the autobiography (mostly) of former National Football League reffing czar Mike Pereira, a man many know from his appearances as the rules expert on Fox NFL broadcasts. I'm almost the perfect target market for this book because I have a lot of interest in both football and refereeing.
Pereira brings us inside the tent of a couple notably closed worlds — the NFL and the reffing community. He tells stories of good refs and bad ones, of difficult times in his personal life, and of off-the-field battles he had with various NFL executives and coaches. Wonderfully, he's not afraid to name names.
The book succeeds largely because Pereira comes off as a likeable guy with a lot of good stories to tell. Many of these are the kind of tales a guy would tell in the bar — rough and unpolished, but told with conviction.
He recalls a crucial call — plus a missed non-call — he made in a 1998 playoff game. He describes fighting to get replay review made a permanent part of the NFL. And he tells of fighting cancer not just once, but twice.
Still, if you don't love the subject so much, the flaws of the book may drive you crazy. First, the book is maddeningly disorganized. The first quarter of the book starts straightforwardly enough as Pereira tells the story of his boyhood and early adult life, his mind focused on his ultimate goal: Joining the NFL.
But at this point — just when you're eager to hear about his first years in the league — Pereira abandons the chronological format and starts jumping all over place. Jarringly, he throws in a chapter on how much referees are paid. I actually enjoyed it, but it is completely out of place. The same can be said about another chapter in which he analyzes key referee decisions from the NFL's past (of which he had no part).
I guess Pereira and his co-writer Rick Jaffe must have had some method to this madness, but the constant back and forth in time is confusing. A chronological approach would have been better. For example, instead of separating Pereira's battles for rule changes and his experience fighting cancer into separate chapters, putting them in context with each other would have given us a more well-rounded picture.
It's a little hard to believe that Pereira had a co-writer on this because the book it is written like Pereira dictated it all over several nights while holding a vodka tonic. Phrases like "So you can guess what happened next," "You should have heard the response," and "I fell for it, hook, line and sinker" give you some idea of the casualness of the writing.
For all the interesting stories Pereira has to tell, he sometimes skips away just when things are getting intriguing. Early in the book, for example, he says that when he first reffed football (a kids game) he realized, "I had found my passion." What was it about the experience that excited him? He doesn't explain.
Later, when he was supervising officials in the Western Athletic Conference he describes catching a bunch of referees cheating on their annual rules test. This would seem to be a big deal, but he laughs it off with a chuckle and moves on.
Those are forgivable flaws, though. If you like football — and especially if you like football and refereeing — you will find "After Further Review" an enjoyable read.
"After Further Review" is the autobiography (mostly) of former National Football League reffing czar Mike Pereira, a man many know from his appearances as the rules expert on Fox NFL broadcasts. I'm almost the perfect target market for this book because I have a lot of interest in both football and refereeing.
Pereira brings us inside the tent of a couple notably closed worlds — the NFL and the reffing community. He tells stories of good refs and bad ones, of difficult times in his personal life, and of off-the-field battles he had with various NFL executives and coaches. Wonderfully, he's not afraid to name names.
The book succeeds largely because Pereira comes off as a likeable guy with a lot of good stories to tell. Many of these are the kind of tales a guy would tell in the bar — rough and unpolished, but told with conviction.
He recalls a crucial call — plus a missed non-call — he made in a 1998 playoff game. He describes fighting to get replay review made a permanent part of the NFL. And he tells of fighting cancer not just once, but twice.
Still, if you don't love the subject so much, the flaws of the book may drive you crazy. First, the book is maddeningly disorganized. The first quarter of the book starts straightforwardly enough as Pereira tells the story of his boyhood and early adult life, his mind focused on his ultimate goal: Joining the NFL.
But at this point — just when you're eager to hear about his first years in the league — Pereira abandons the chronological format and starts jumping all over place. Jarringly, he throws in a chapter on how much referees are paid. I actually enjoyed it, but it is completely out of place. The same can be said about another chapter in which he analyzes key referee decisions from the NFL's past (of which he had no part).
I guess Pereira and his co-writer Rick Jaffe must have had some method to this madness, but the constant back and forth in time is confusing. A chronological approach would have been better. For example, instead of separating Pereira's battles for rule changes and his experience fighting cancer into separate chapters, putting them in context with each other would have given us a more well-rounded picture.
It's a little hard to believe that Pereira had a co-writer on this because the book it is written like Pereira dictated it all over several nights while holding a vodka tonic. Phrases like "So you can guess what happened next," "You should have heard the response," and "I fell for it, hook, line and sinker" give you some idea of the casualness of the writing.
For all the interesting stories Pereira has to tell, he sometimes skips away just when things are getting intriguing. Early in the book, for example, he says that when he first reffed football (a kids game) he realized, "I had found my passion." What was it about the experience that excited him? He doesn't explain.
Later, when he was supervising officials in the Western Athletic Conference he describes catching a bunch of referees cheating on their annual rules test. This would seem to be a big deal, but he laughs it off with a chuckle and moves on.
Those are forgivable flaws, though. If you like football — and especially if you like football and refereeing — you will find "After Further Review" an enjoyable read.
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