A day in the life...

To give you, my loyal readers (all 2.7 of you), an idea of what a day in the life of a JV is like, here is a typical synopsis of my day.

Every other day, I get up around 6:30 to go for a run with Amber and Jenna, my roommates. On the days that I don’t run, I wake up around 7:30 (don’t worry—I lift weights after work on those days). We get moving around 6:45, and typically get back between 7:15 and 7:30. The three of us share a bathroom, so we have to get back in time to get cleaned up before work.

We normally eat breakfast on a rotating basis in the kitchen. I put on coffee and get to work on eating because I only have to walk two blocks to get to work. We see very little of each other in the mornings because there are six of us going in five different directions (Jenna and Mark work at the same school, so they have to leave together). I make it out the door by 8:50 every morning and walk to work.

Once I get to my office, I read the reports that our security guards write up from the day before. They typically deal with 911 calls (as this is a building for elderly and disabled people, many of them are frail or in poor health. Since we have over three hundred tenants, the odds are pretty high that someone’s going the hospital), harassment issues, fires, noise complaints, and illegal guests. Then, when it’s warranted, my office (usually me) writes cease notices (As in, “We demand that you cease this behavior, or your lease will be terminated.”). I only recently learned to write them, but I’ll be doing that on a daily basis this year.

The social services office concerns itself mostly with getting tenants to and from the doctor, getting their prescriptions filled and delivered to them, helping pay the bills (it’s their money—we just fill out the forms. Many of the tenants never learned to read, so we do a lot of that stuff for them), and making sure that everyone is generally healthy, well-fed taking their medicine, etc. It’s sort of like being a professional mom. :)

We also handle a lot of emergencies in conjunction with the security officers and medical personnel. Since I’ve been in this office, there have been three emergencies situations that I’ve been part of. One turned out to be a false alarm, but we couldn’t find a tenant and had to go into his apartment—in case he had died. Evidently, that happens a lot around here. But he wasn’t there, dead or alive, so it turned out to be a mere blip on the radar. I won’t lie, though—my heart was pounding pretty hard when we first walked in that door. The other two involved getting a lady to go to the hospital because she was quite ill but refusing treatment; the other involved protecting one of my coworkers from someone who was threatening her. I can’t really tell any more about those situations, for obvious reasons.

But, though exciting (if not fun) little crises like that pop up on a regular basis, it’s pretty standard office work.

I walk home at 5pm and meet up with the other Camden JVs, my housemates. We make a point to eat dinner together every night, which is really wonderful for all of us. We take turns cooking, though for a while we just let Mark, the only man in the house, do it because he’s a REALLY talented cook. After dinner there’s usually tea, and often a game or discussion. We like each other a lot, so this is quite a balm for our weary minds after a day of work..

Then we get up and do it all over again in the morning. :)

This has been A Day in the Life of a Camden JV… tune in next time!