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I've heard hospitals are dangerously short on gloves. The restaurant where I work (worked? Will I ever work again?) is closed for the foreseeable future and has a case of nitrile gloves sitting in a closet. Can we donate them to health care workers? —Cathleen A.
Indeed you can; contact info is below if you're in a hurry. (You know shit is getting real when Dr. Know skips the dick jokes and makes straight for the public-service journalism.) As a fellow restaurant worker—just until my novel gets published, though I admit I could speed up the process by writing it—I'm embarrassed I didn't think of this myself.
Just last Thursday, Portland Fire & Rescue tweeted a call for gloves, masks and the like to "people in the medical field who are no longer operating, those in the construction field who have dust masks and respirators, and whomever else has equipment to share." They may not have realized that restaurants could also be a good source (for gloves, at least).
That's understandable, since the overlap in the Venn diagram of "members of the government/public health/media complex" and "hard-drinking restaurant workers who haven't gotten up before noon since 1998" is pretty much just me.
Still, we in this latter group know that every bar and restaurant in Oregon has a case or two of disposable gloves in the back that no one ever uses unless they lose a bet and have to spend an entire shift making salads. And now no one is using them even for that!
So, all you newly idle bartenders, furloughed cocktail servers, disused prep cooks and, of course, all you managers who now have no one to yell at: I challenge you to find someone with a valid driver's license, borrow your mom's car, and take your donation to one of these three donation sites:
Portland Fire & Rescue Fire Marshal's Office, 1300 SE Gideon St. Noon-4 pm Monday-Friday.
Multnomah Building, 501 SE Hawthorne Blvd. (loading dock on Southeast 6th Avenue). 9 am-4 pm Monday- Friday, 10 am-2 pm Saturday-Sunday.
Yeon Building, 1620 SE 190th Ave. 8 am-4 pm Monday-Friday.
Failing that, contact the joint city-county donations management unit at esf15.volunteerdonations@multco.us, or fill out the Portland Business Alliance donations survey at surveymonkey.com/r/PPE4region. (I know neither of these addresses is exactly catchy, but now is not the time to be churlish.)