Volunteers hurried through the lobby as I stepped inside, and there was nobody at the front table.
That is the whole job, the front table. Somebody sits there and tells a nineteen-year-old to eat something first, and tells a woman scared of needles she can sit with her back to the room, and watches faces on the way out, because a person about to go down goes gray around the mouth before they know it themselves.
The app had checked all of them in. The app cannot see a face.
I stood in my coat ten minutes and watched three first-timers leave because the line did not move and nobody told them why. Then a woman in the recovery chairs went over sideways and a college kid caught her elbow more by luck than anything.
At eleven-forty the phone at the desk rang and it was St. Luke’s, and they needed O negative, and they needed it that afternoon.
Kaitlyn looked at her screen and said the system would push a notification to everyone in the scheduling group.
I told her there are forty-one O negatives in this county. Eleven of them do not own a telephone that gets notifications. Six of them are farmers who will not look at a screen between now and dark but who will get up from their own supper table if a house phone rings and it is me on it.
She looked at me a long second. Then she said, “Do you know the numbers?”
I have known those numbers since before she was born.
I sat at that front table and called for two hours. Nineteen units went to St. Luke’s before five. Dwight Merkel came in from Palo with manure still on his boots and apologized for it to a room that did not care.
Kaitlyn drove out to my house on Sunday. She had gone digging in the county records first, and she brought a page she had printed off, and she read it to me at my own kitchen table.
It is from the board minutes, September of 2008, three months after the flood, when the hospitals ran short and the roads were out and we held drives in a church basement on a generator.
Be it resolved: that in the June flood this county did not run out of blood, and the reason was not a system. It was one man with a clipboard and a telephone, and this board wishes his name entered in the record.
I did not know that existed. Nobody ever told me. They passed it and filed it and went on to the sewer bond.
She kept the app. She should. It is better than paper for most of what we do and I have said so.
But there is a field in it now called CALL LIST. Eleven names, each with a house number and the best hour to try it. It took us four evenings. She would not let me do it alone.
I am back at the front table on drive days. Thirty-two years this fall. My title is donor relations, which pays nothing and means I get to watch faces.
A screen can hold every name in a county. It cannot know one single thing about any of them.