Jack Bauer To The Rescue!
Today was surreal. The big item on the agenda was our interview with another local nonprofit, whose professionally done website made us think it was a large organization. Turns out it is one lady who runs it all out of her house. What she has done is really cool with organizing a charity drive back when she was in Los Angeles and starting up a nonprofit in New Orleans, but as a person she was startlingly full of herself and incredibly condescending. This is coming from a person whose own mother once told him, "You are the most egotistical person I have ever met." She denies this of course. Anyways, the lady not only was totally full of her annoying self, but she also has the strangest background ever, starting as a personal assistant/public relations type in Los Angeles. Her "credentials" from those days are based on "assisting celebrities," whatever that means. She then went into product placement and founded a company that is described as, no joke, "the first marketing firm for luxury dog products." She apparently really likes dogs. She actually was not there when we had arrived because she was at the vet because her dog was having allergy trouble. Anyways her organization seemed cool based on its website, but there was just this strange feeling coming out of the meeting. Lance hit the nail on the head when we got back and he listened to Meredith's explanation of the organization and said, "I can't decide if this is a scam or not..." From there we investigated this organization online to see if it was a scam or not. They charge volunteers $200 bucks a week and after thinking of possible costs we thought it was highly unlikely that the expenses ran as high as the income, much less personally put her in the hole $5000 a year as she claimed. The organization itself is not 5013c tax exempt, but it is under an umbrella organization that is. This umbrella organization's website, however, claimed it was "currently exploring the dissolution. [They] are in the process of shutting down our existing operations, and we are no longer accepting donations." I have no idea what in God's name that means but it sounds a little shady. The strangest part of the visit was a story she told us about her charity drive in Los Angeles. She told us that the whole project was in danger of falling apart because the trucks they planned on using were part of a scam and weren't going to show up to transport the goods. Well when this happened apparently the local media coverage turned into a national news story, and suddenly everyone across the country wanted to help. A bunch of trucking companies offered free trucks and everything, but she claims it didn't stop there. According to her story, the Canadian government called and offered a
C-130 aircraft
to fly the supplies to New Orleans. Think about what that means. A foreign government calls a United States citizen with no government affiliation and simply offers the use of a MILITARY TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT. It gets even better. The only thing she needed to get the C-130 is FAA approval to fly it from California to Louisiana. Well for a normal person this would pose a problem but thankfully she had Jack Bauer handy. Seriously, some random person supposedly walked by, overheard the problem, and claimed to know the head of the FAA. A phone call later and she supposedly had clearance to fly A MILITARY AIRCRAFT BELONGING TO A FOREIGN SOVEREIGNTY INTO ANY UNITED STATES AIRPORT. The best part of all, however, is that she says she turned the offer down because "how would it look for a girl in California to get airplanes from the Canadian government when President Bush can't get FEMA water trucks into New Orleans?" Yes, that's right, she didn't want to show up the leader of the free world. How much of this story is true? I have no idea, but frankly, I don't care. It was such an insane story I could care less if she made it all up five minutes before we showed up while she was driving back from getting Fluffy her pollen allergy medicine. Which she probably did. For the record, I seriously doubt that this organization is a scam and I respect that they do "nonprofit" work in New Orleans. She also was very helpful at the end of the meeting by providing us with contact information for other nonprofits. With that said, however, she was so crazy full of herself I wanted to slap her across the face. Of course, that probably would have angered Canada.