A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbleached in today's episode of the show, if you prefer a BP version, you can find that at our website, This American Life, Dawg.

Government in this country, you may have heard it's not running smoothly these days. That's true in the United States Capitol this week, if you a senator wanting to do the official count of Electoral College votes, having your work delayed by an angry mob, and what's true if you're a dentist in New York City?

I've been to get a cold vaccine from your state government, Dennis. There's supposed to be in group one A according to the Centers for Disease Control guidelines, supposed to be in the very first group to get the vaccine because peering closely into people's open mouths all day puts them in danger of a virus that is carried by droplets on people's breath. But when they started rolling out the vaccine in December in New York, not only did dentists not get vaccinated, we were just kept in the dark alleys.

In remarks in New York dentist, she says she and other dentists did get emails from the state dental association.

I can send you some of the emails that they've they've sent to me. And they're just very confusing.

Confusing, like how they're confused. Like they say. We know that dentists are in group one A we don't yet know when or how you'll be able to make an appointment. For Dr. Naimark, at one level, and I don't want to overstate this, she seems like a careful, measured kind of person who does not get up on a soapbox at one level. To her, it is not surprising that dentists would get this kind of treatment.

Then she says they don't get respect.

There is a bias against dentists. There's definitely there's there's a cultural kind of fear. I'm just thinking about that. What's the movie?

I thought she was going to say Marathon Man. But now where they go to Las Vegas, The Hangover and the Hangover, where Ed Helms plays a dentist and he's a dentist and he gets like he gets made fun of for being a dentist.

Right. It's like this big joke that we have. Oh, you're not a doctor. You're a dentist.

So not even being told when they'd get the vaccine, even though the one time she said par for the course, she and other New York dentist did get an official email on New Year's Eve, an email that had been sent out at the very businesslike time of five or seven p.m. New Year's Eve. They did have a promising link to vaccination locations. But when Dr. Naimark clicked on that link with her information, she found there's nothing for dentists in New York City.

It isn't just that they seem to be at the back of the line. It's the lack of information. That's what gets to Dr. Naimark.

She finally did learn when the state would be vaccinating Dennis, but it wasn't from any official source. Somebody she knew just texted her.

The vaccinations were supposedly going to start this week, the week that began Monday, January 4th, the fourth week of the vaccine rollout.

But when she tried to actually schedule an appointment for a shot on the official website, there seemed to be no available appointments for dentists.

But people have been checking and so we've been emailing each other. So it's kind of this underground network of people who are kind of looking out for each other. Oh, I know that you haven't been vaccinated yet. I just got an appointment. Let me text you.

So basically, like, it's this like underground thing, like it's a Russia under Stalin or something. And you guys are passing each other little pieces of paper saying here's where you go for your shot.

Exactly. It's like the bread line is over there. Mm hmm. Go ahead and sign up.

I was actually born in the Soviet Union, so. Oh, you were? Yeah. So you have training. You're ready.

I'm ready to talk to somebody on the New York State Vaccine Distribution Task Force, which is supposed to be advising the state on how to do all this. Name's Rose Duhan. She also runs a community health care association of New York State where she says she is spending all day, every day trying to distribute vaccine. I have to say, she made a pretty convincing case for why dentists are not being vaccinated till week four, even though the designated one day in New York State, the state estimated that there are two million health care workers, two million people who fall into that one a priority.

So that's a lot of people and it's just not feasible to vaccinate everybody the first day.

So the state decided the first dibs should go to people who are in more immediate danger, like medical personnel who care directly for covid patients and nursing home staffs and residents. When I ran that by Dr. Naimark, she agreed it seemed sensible that nobody had told this to her.

Nobody is pretending vaccine distribution is going well in New York right now. The state has only managed to administer about 40 percent of the vaccine that it's been given, which is actually better than the country as a whole, which is used about a fourth of the vaccine that's out there. Still, the phrase doesn't used to describe her own feeling about how it's going. Was this somewhat panicked?

And she ticked off some of the many, many logistical challenges they faced, figuring out which facilities could deliver the most shots and how to staff and schedule and track hundreds of thousands of people getting vaccine. They had to create scheduling software to figure out what to do in smaller health centers if people don't show up for appointments, which is an issue, because once you have opened up a vial of the vaccine, you have to use all the 10 doses inside of it in a few hours, or they go bad for their health centers who have been told to vaccinate people from other kinds of facilities like mental health providers.

And the health centers are trying to figure out, OK, how much allocation do they have? How much of the other providers, staff can they accommodate? How can they get those people either to come to the health center or is there a way to get some of the vaccine to those residential settings? It's so. I don't know, the details are so kind of mind numbing when you describe. Yes, yes.

I love that this process begins on the front end with these, like, super geniuses using this incredibly advanced science to, like, invent the thing that was the hard part.

And then just literally like, how do we schedule people from this facility into like a time when we can get enough of them to use all the dose in the vial?

You know, that's where we're getting stuck. Yes.

And I think that's really where the people who do that kind of thing don't get enough credit. Exactly. There's no Nobel Prize for that.

There's no Nobel Prize for scheduling people. One person president finally did get scheduled, Dr. Naimark, though, the only appointment that a dentist like her could get was 40 miles away. The situation we're in now said the CDC, made it carefully thought out plan for who should get immunized first and second and third.

And then that plan collided with reality. And when and where we'll all get our vaccine is going to depend on these logistical details and how well they are managed. Today on our program, we see just how common this is.

We have other stories of this happening, scarce resources that need to go to somebody and how they end up getting allocated, whether those resources are a place to stay for the night, for love and companionship being redistributed in all kinds of new ways since the pandemic from WB's Chicago.

It's this American Life.

I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us. At one God committee, so we started this example of a very pure situation, a people have been given the difficult task of trying to figure out how to distribute something important. In fact, in this case, life saving medicine, they're deciding basically who will live or die and the very idealistic solution they came up with. Louis Sullivan tells the story, which starts, as you might expect, with a medical breakthrough back in 1960, a doctor named Belding's Scribner had a patient, a young man with kidney problems.

It was something Dr. Scrivner had no way to treat. So we had to send the guy home to his family to die. The case haunted Dr. Scribner one night you woke up at 4:00 a.m. with an idea, a way he could have saved that man, a Teflon tube that could be stitched into the blood vessels of the arm and stay implanted there. It made long term dialysis possible for the first time. They'd pull the blood out of someone's body, clean it the way a kidney does and put it back in.

People called it a medical miracle, an artificial organ that could cheat death.

There was a problem, though, the machine they came up with is big and complicated, they built it from a Sears Roebuck freezer that they'd modified with a bunch of other parts.

Nurses called the machine the monster because it was so big and unwieldy and every patient needed to spend dozens of hours each week connected to it.

And only five of these machines existed still in the experimental stages. So they could only take care of a few people. And there were thousands of people dying from kidney failure every year in the country.

So on one hand, a miracle on the other doctors. Scribner had treated one harrowing problem, a medical one for an equally harrowing ethical problem.

How do you choose which few to save and which thousands would die? Dr. Scribner started getting flooded with requests from people desperate to be put on the machine. The pressure was crushing him, saying no was insuring a person's death. He went to the administrators who are helping to oversee this whole project and asked for help. The administrators took it from there.

The first thing the administrators decided is, you know what? This isn't a medical decision at all. This is a societal decision. So they decided to assemble a group of people. They chose these people not because these people had any medical knowledge or really any relevant experience at all. These are ordinary people hand-picked to represent a cross-section of moral American society.

I am a banker. I am a surgeon. I am a lawyer.

This is from a documentary from 1965. I am a labor leader. I'm a housewife. I am a clergyman. The names, the faces of those who serve on this committee are never made known to those who apply for the places on the kidney machine.

The committee was strict about anonymity in the documentary. Their heads are darkened so you can't see their faces. These people have just been going about their lives. When the dialysis centers administrators asked them to come in, one of the people in the group, a young minister, told them it wasn't for him to choose who would live and die. The doctor said, we are not asking you to decide who will die, this is already determined. We are asking you to help decide who will be given the opportunity of extended life.

The minister agreed to do it. They all did.

A few of them said it would be too cruel to force this responsibility onto someone else.

Officially, they were called the Admissions and Policies Committee, the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center at Swedish Hospital. But a lot of people called them the God Committee.

At the time, again, this is in 1960, there was no blueprint for this. The doctors gave them no guidelines. The committee considered first come, first served or drawing straws, but they'd been told to use their consciences. So they came up with a set of principles and rules. The first rules were clear cut.

The treatment was in Seattle, so they'd only look at applicants who lived in Washington state. Washington taxpayers were funding the research. They also decided No one over forty five there could be medical complications and those people had at least had a shot at life and no one under 18.

The treatment was physically and emotionally demanding.

No one knew how it might affect kids, but those rules only got them so far. They decided they'd base their final selection on something else social worth.

They try to save the person whose death would most hurt society.

They made a list of the factors they'd weigh marital status, number of dependents, income, net worth to pay for the treatment, sex education, occupation, emotional stability, past performance, future potential and personal references.

They made a policy of never meeting any of the candidates in person or even knowing their names, because denying a person you'd met face to face seemed to hard. They once let a journalist come see how they made one of these decisions. They just had a meeting where the doctors have presented them with five applications and the committee could only pick two. They walked the journalists through how they made that choice, tried to recreate for her the conversation they just had.

Here's a transcript of their discussion. Banker just to get the ball rolling, why don't we start with number one, the housewife from Walla Walla.

Surgeon, this patient could not commute for the treatment from Mulwala, so she would have to find a way to move her family to Seattle banker. Exactly my point.

It says here that her husband has no funds to make such a move.

Lawyer then, are you proposing we eliminate this candidate on the grounds that she could not possibly accept treatment if it were offered?

Minister?

How can we compare a family situation of two children such as this woman in Walla Walla with a family of six children, such as patient number four, the aircraft worker? This is something they talk about a lot. If one candidate has one kid and the other is two, should you pick the candidate with two kids? They go round and round trying to answer a question that has no answer.

Labor leader, for the children's sake, we've got to reckon with the surviving parents opportunity to remarry. And a woman with three children has a better chance to find a new husband than a very young widow with six children. Surgeon How can we possibly be sure of that?

How do the rest of you feel about number three, the small businessman with three children? I'm impressed that his doctor took special pains to mention that this man is active in church work.

This is an indication to me of character and moral strength housewife, which would certainly help him conform to the demands of the treatment lawyer. It would also help him to endure a lingering death housewife if we're still looking for the man with the highest potential of service to society.

I think we must consider that the chemists and the accountant have the finest educational backgrounds of all five candidates. In the end, the people they chose were mostly men, white and well-off, people like them, which seems inevitable given the criteria they'd come up with to select for what they called social worth, education, future potential income. The treatment costs about fifteen thousand dollars a year, but would be about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars today, and it often wasn't covered by insurance.

They'd written all these rules to try to be fair, but they'd created an outcome that was anything but sometimes, I mean, try to guess your own biases. You come up with a very incomplete list. In a letter the minister wrote a few years later, he talked about how he'd been extra careful to guard against his own biases and not favor people who were good church members. Later on, he worried that he might have gone too far, been unfairly hard on religious people.

The the final votes were always made by consensus.

They said that gave them some comfort, some differences.

I think that we are all of the same opinion at the present time. Does everyone agree? Well, I think I arrived at that point that we are then ready to cast a vote in our poll, all in favor of accepting Mr. De say I opposed Mr. Diaz accepted as the next candidate for goodness.

It's hard to find many recordings of Dr. Scribner, but I found an oral history recorded decades after all this happened where he talked about the God committee.

This was widely criticized afterward.

The problem, just in a word, was you were faced with impossible shows. Well, all right. Of course, it wasn't fair at all, but it was the best we could do.

And Dr. Scrivner, he talked to these patients constantly.

He couldn't have the distance of the God committee had. I've talked to a few of his patients. They all said he was a really caring doctor. And there was one patient he particularly liked, a patient whose experience ended up changing everything for dialysis and for the God committee, she was a teenage girl named Caroline. I talked to her mom, Susan. She had a slutty personality. She was a very happy, happy, happy girl, a very likable one or a well-rounded I would like to say.

How did you know that Dr. Scrivner liked Carolyn so much?

I sort of instinctive as a mother, you get the feeling for if somebody likes your kid or not.

Caroline is 15. A good student scout leader taught piano when she was sick.

The athletes would carry her up and down the stairs at school. Kids from her youth group at church would donate blood. When Caroline's kidneys started to fail, Dr. Scribner submitted her case to the committee, even though he knew the rule, No. One under 18. Did he tell you when he put Carolyn in front of the committee? Did you know that it was going on? Did I know what was going on? No, no, I didn't know until after the fact that that's what he had done.

Oh, no, I didn't know there was a committee to choose who lives and dies. And she was turned down. What was that like for you? I can remember the conversation, I just know I was totally silent. Trying, I guess, to absorb what was being said. I don't know how you put into words the feeling you have when you're delivering a death sentence like that. You're. A part of you dies, you know, you just.

Everything stops. And it still does when I think about it, as a matter of fact. Were you ever angry that the committee know just that she didn't just not at all? No, not at all, really. I mean, they have their rules and regulations and where you may have one hundred people can only take two. You pretty much have to, you know, have to stick by the rules. Dr. Scribner didn't see it that way, Dr.

Scribner was not content with that decision. He thought he had a good case and had pleaded it well. And I really thought he he felt that his cohorts would go along with him. He was a highly respected man and I don't think he was used to having anybody say no to him. Dr. Scribner tried to find a way, he told the committee, I'll try it out on my own time, nights and weekends, just let me use the machines, they said no.

He couldn't accept it. He had another idea, something he'd been thinking about for a while, a smaller machine, one that someone could take into their house and run themselves without any medical staff.

It was nowhere near ready to be tested. And that's where we lucked out. And he was going to do whatever it took to keep her around until that machine was ready.

He called the guy who helped him build the dialysis machine, an engineer named Albert Babb. He told me about Caroline said, do you think we could make this? She only has four months. Albert asked Dr. Scrivner on the committee.

Get mad that you're going around them. Dr. Scrivner said, no, this has nothing to do with them. I'll get other funding. The engineer wanted to help his whole team did they weren't technically supposed to. They're at the university and they're supposed to be working on something else, but they work nonstop to do it. They decided not to tell the university concerned the dean would shut it down. Someone on their team would actually do Dean watch, as they called it, keeping an eye out for the dean and warning their team over the intercom if they saw him in their lab.

They put their designs and sketches on sliding panels. When the dean entered the building, they'd quickly switch the panels around to hide their work on the machine.

To get around the God committee, Dr. Scrivner set it up independently as a research project, Caroline would use the dialysis machine at home. Susan would run the whole thing.

It was presented to us as being a strictly family matter to see if a family could run it. Correct?

I believe it was phrased something like, can layman non-professional people assume the role of engineer and nurse? So can lay people be trained? The engineers finished the new machine in four months and rushed it to Caroline's house in August of 1964. Susan learned how to do what before had only been done in a hospital run, the machine that would remove her daughter's blood from her body, wash it and feed it back in through her arm. Except it was happening in the basement of her house in a special room they'd set up for Caroline.

I would put her on the machine, usually between six and seven o'clock at night, and that would mean taking her off after nine or 10 hours. So it was early, early morning, and then she would just stay in bed maybe for an hour and then eat breakfast before she went back to school. And you take her off around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. So you'd wake up in the middle of the night and. Oh, I was awake all night.

Oh, you were? Oh, you stay awake all night. Our machines were so experimental, really. Our alarms were going off all the time and then we'd have to figure out what was wrong with it.

A constant problem was that her blood clot and clogged the little tube, the little shunt that Dr. Scrivner had invented in Caroline's arm. I would have to get out heparin and sailin in the syringe and unblock the clot. If it was on Clarabelle. That was very painful for her.

And it hurt me, you know, to to pain her that way. But if I mean, you had to get the blood flowing again and I had no alternative but to do that, that was probably our biggest hurdle.

Was just keeping her blood moving. Were you ever worried that you would get something wrong? Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, in when ways life is in your hands. I mean, really, when I felt her life was in my hands, I was always aware of it. Something could go wrong, but I better not let it happen. You have to concentrate and you do everything just right. Hmm, because she was she was sick and now I think my feeling was I hope she feels better after this because she was sick.

And in just a few weeks, Caroline felt better.

Oh, yeah, she did. Her eyes sparkled and she was talkative and. I felt like this is the beginning of a new chapter in our life. How did Dr. Scribner do you know, how did he feel when he saw that it was working? Oh, of course he was just jubilant. Oh, he was just grinning from ear to ear. This research project was supposed to take three years to show whether or not home dialysis could be a viable treatment.

But within one year, doctors agreed this would work.

This is what they would do. Susan kept dialyse and Caroline and Caroline kept getting better. She graduated high school, started college. But dialysis is a treatment, not a cure. And it was still experimental. A person's veins and arteries would often scar over and stop accepting the treatment.

As the doctors had said, it was a chance that extended life. In Caroline's case, that meant four more years. She used up all of her usable veins and arteries and they're having a very difficult time putting her on dialysis so that during the time she was in the hospital, it was two or three weeks. I think I would dialyse her there as best I could for, you know, maybe as little as an hour before the blood quit flowing and then she just deteriorated.

Lily.

Oh, I'm so sorry. She was in intensive care in the hospital and she died at night when I had have gone home.

We knew that she wasn't going to come out of it. But I guess I was as prepared as anybody could be. Knowing that knowing that we had done everything we could and that. The bottom line is we left a legacy for all the rest of these people that not only our country, but in the world, that. That half that can live because of foot. We pioneered. After Susan and Caroline showed that home dialysis could work, Dr. Scribner immediately put dozens of patients on home dialysis people around the world started building these machines.

It got cheaper and with way more access to dialysis, they no longer needed a committee to play God the God committee story. Now, it's seen as a dark moment in medical history.

People actually point to it as the birth of bioethics. We had to invent an entire field to deal with these questions. We've agreed that having people vote on who makes the cut to live or to die was a bad idea.

Although the truth is we vote on life and death decisions all the time, just from a greater distance, deciding things like who gets health insurance or where the best hospitals go, which in a pandemic can make all the difference.

You decide these things a lot. We just don't use the words God committee. It's easier that way. Ellis Island is one of the producers of our show, Susan Vukic, the mom in that story, died a few years back. She was 91 after her daughter, Carolyn, died. She spent the rest of her life teaching people how to dialyzed their family members at home. Now to Winter's Bone, so when it comes to who will love that, of course it's not decided by a panel of experts somewhere we need to decide for ourselves who we want to be with.

And one of our producers on a baker has noticed the way people are deciding on that setting, on who makes the cut, who gets first date or becomes part of their life, and a much bigger way in New York City where she lives, says all that's changed lately.

Have you heard about finding your winter? I hadn't either. Apparently, it's a thing single people in New York have been doing since covid. Basically, over the summer and fall, people started scrambling to find someone, anyone before winter in a second lock down. Back in August, completely oblivious to this phenomenon, I went on a date with a guy we met on Hinge, the dating app, our first date, we'd spent six feet apart in a park for our second date.

We met at an outdoor restaurant. It was going well. We just put in our order when he said, what do we do about Hinche?

What do you mean? I mean, do I delete my profile? Why would you delete your profile? Because I met this really great girl and I'm totally into her. I paused. Is it me?

Yes, of course. I was so confused I'd had to pull a pin drop before the date to remind me of his name and he was ready to be exclusive. I am not new to dating.

This doesn't happen. Straight men in New York City rarely want relationships. The whole game is to stay single.

At best, you get invited into their harem one of three or four people they're sleeping with. No one ever wants to eliminate the possibility of other options so quickly. But then this kept happening.

I go on dates and everyone wanted to have road trip style marathon bonding sessions that lasted hours longer than usual.

They wanted to see me again. They sent me flowers. They even held hands. This was my first time back in the game for a while, I'd taken a break from dating for nearly a year, I'd gone through a bad breakup. I left town for a while, did some therapy, meditated. And now back on the scene, I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up to a world where men suddenly wanted commitment.

I went on 10 dates of them, nine wanted to keep seeing me by comparison, three years ago when I was last single, I went on 35 dates of them to wanted to keep seeing me. I thought, did I get hot? All those months of work on myself had really paid off. I told this all to my friend Humza, did I get hot, did you get hot? He could not stop laughing, you idiot.

It's covid that's when Hommes explained about people trying to find their winter. A friend of a friend named Christine, a single woman in her 50s, told me in her experience, it's not subtle.

You know, one or two men has said to me, Winter's coming and I'm really hoping to meet someone to spend the winter with.

They've said that another person I talked to, Kelsey, 22, said she recognized what was happening early because she used to see in Chicago every winter before temperatures dropped to below zero and going outside was a non-starter. People would rush to couple up. She said everyone called it cuffing season as in handcuffs.

I was out. I was kind of seeing this guy casually and we were out one night and we are sitting down at the bar kind of talking. And he was like, oh, by the way, like we're together, right? And I was like, oh, my God, you don't know me. Like, no, I don't want to, like, be exclusively with you. And by the end of the night, he had gone home with someone else.

So basically I it was like it was musical chairs. He was trying to sit down in my chair and I said no. And he found another open chair and he was done. And it was great cuffing season. And I'm sure that relationship ended by this, but by the time people were going out again. Kelsey says now it's covid cuffing season like we're living in a forever winter. We're supposed to stay in dating multiple people as reckless. So people are settling.

She told me one roommate of hers ended up with a girl who wouldn't normally be into around Thanksgiving and then another one left and is now living in a van in Colorado with an ex-boyfriend.

But she doesn't want to date, but I think she didn't want to be anywhere near New York.

That's like an extreme kind of a destination to.

I guess you'd think it'd be nice after all these years of rejection, guys being into me right off the bat or being texted. I miss you hours after meeting, but here's the problem of what they're doing, projecting building up an entire fantasy based on barely knowing someone.

That's my thing. You can't take my thing one time.

I like the guy so much after meeting him once that I spend a week imagining all the dates we go on together, including one where we got stoned and back spontaneously and coloring coloring books. By the time we went out again, I'd been on so many imaginary dates with him. My brain genuinely didn't know the difference between real life and what I'd pretended we'd done.

But only one person can do that at a time. Otherwise you're both too into it way too soon. And that's bringing delusion to delusion and it cancels the whole thing out. Now I feel like I'm on the other side of the equation and watching people try to find their winter. I am watching what I used to do and how disturbing it must have been. I get why 33 out of thirty five men passed on me. It's off putting.

I told Kelsey I don't like this new world of musical chairs we're living in. What the real question is, do you need a chair?

Like, I've just like really this I don't like. I'd so much rather just be dancing around and like, not have a chair.

It's like sit on a chair and sometimes you got to sit on a chair.

Sometimes you've got to hold your butt. Like if it's an uncomfortable chair, like you're going to be more miserable in the chair than, like not in a chair.

I don't I don't know.

I had this like, oh, my God, I was getting out of the subway. I was getting out of the subway. And this guy approached me and he had a mask on and he was like, excuse me, can I ask you a question? And I thought for sure he was going to ask directions. So I said, yeah.

And he was like, I, I, I just bought a farm upstate and I'm growing my own locally sourced produce and I'm looking for a girl to get in a relationship that I can bring upstate with me.

Is this something I'd be interested in? Oh, my gosh. And I thought, well, you should give him my number, I'm interested. I mean, like what is happening to the world is is this truly the end of days also?

Because I'm used to guys using like, you know, I work in finance or I have financial stability, like using things to like real me in but never crops.

No one has ever said no.

I got some crops at crops, but it's totally he's using his space. He's like, I have fresh air in the land of capital right now. That is total it's total capital right now.

I get that it's hard to be alone, but this level of desperation is a bit much. He was a step away from saying, I have a van, two shotguns and a can of gas get in. We can make it at least two weeks before the zombies catch up to us when really all we're in danger of is watching Netflix alone.

I thought I could never be this way, but as I talk to people, I admired the single minded practicality of some of these New Yorkers. My friend Misha is a psychologist. She says people suffer when they're isolated.

People need to be touched.

She went looking for a winter to preserve her mental well-being. She's not deceiving anyone.

She's clear about what she's looking for, a warm body, which doesn't sound very romantic, but I feel like that's kind of where we're at, where I'm at in this moment. So you just want somebody for how long?

I tell you a vaccine and you're totally fine with it being someone that you wouldn't normally be attracted to or want to spend time with?

Well, I'm having to come into that and having to lower my standards. Would you say that you're picky?

So I guess I used to be picky. You know, I had my eye because I had my list that, you know, had to be checked off like money in the bank. Good credit. Also, a gentleman has the same vision as me, right? We're aligned and we both want to build in community and, you know, close the racial wealth gap, you know, whatever we give back black power couple I used to have on my on my life dating profiles.

I would just say looking for the Barack to my Michelle, like, that's all I would put someone else's standard was Barack Obama.

Yeah, but but Barack with Michelle because Michelle's smarter than him. Better than him and he values that, and yet she pushes him to greatness. And now you know now well, you know, if you can hold the conversation, you don't you're not overtly like an asshole and you're smart enough.

Yeah.

Even these new lower standards were not low enough, like she match with the guy who had kids, which is usually a deal breaker for her and was a, quote, filmmaker, which is another deal breaker because she feels like filmmaker, the job everyone in New York claims.

But she agreed to a first date. He told her he baqer a pie. She was expecting an entire pie. He'd just brought a piece. He'd eaten the rest, but she was willing to overlook it.

I was like, you could even tell me about your film, quote unquote. Like, listen to that, whatever. You know, like, I'll listen to your stories. I don't know, parenting during remote learning, whatever. Like, I'm so willing.

But for their second date, he insisted on coming over. She kept pushing for an outdoor restaurant. When he said no, she countered with how about coffee? Finally, he confessed he'd spent all his money on Thanksgiving dinner and he couldn't afford it. She is still seeking a winter. Most people I talked to weren't as pragmatic as. If anything, it's been kind of stunning seeing people who were players before covid suddenly questioning their life choices and wanting families or at least real love, like my friend Ian, who used to be more of a Meesha of all the people I saw searching for a winter, I was most surprised by him.

When Ian is single, which he usually is, he's prolific.

He would, as he put it, Automan on apps to come to his apartment like you order food on seemless. He also dates women.

But the pandemic broke him something about being alone all those months during the first lockdown.

You can't help but feel like are we at the end of Fight Club with, you know, the world falling down around us and you better grab onto someone's hand or else you're going to go through it alone.

Ian would bike through the abandoned city. It was so empty he laid in the middle of Fifth Avenue one afternoon. It felt apocalyptic. Being alone, it changed him. When he was dating before, there were always unlimited options, always someone better when you stop. Seeing everyone as an option, you can't help but start seeing people as the one. For better or worse, so dramatic, the shift totally, we're living in a very dramatic time, you know, when things get when it starts to get dark at two p.m., you have no choice to be alone.

No.

You know, alone in the darkness. No, I'd rather have someone next to me and we'll figure it out later.

Being alone also changed, Christine. She's used to being super busy. She's a successful theater person. She has two kids. Her ex and her would trade off week to week and she go from having a full house to being completely alone. She lives facing a highway. And for the first time ever, there was no traffic sound.

And I can remember just waking up in the morning or falling asleep at night and just being in my bed and and so wishing that there was somebody with me that I could hold and that I could just just hug and and and be with in in that silence. And I eventually bought myself a stuffed animal. So I did to you know, I bought a teddy bear.

She got a unicorn and wrapped it in a baby blanket. Christine and Ian, they're not looking for someone to winter with till they get their vaccine, they want to find their person, they want love.

I think the guys I've been dating during covid are looking for that, too. I think they genuinely believe they've found it in me. Our minds can play tricks on us when we need a break from reality.

Like the guy who told me I had a vision of the woman who he wanted to be with a month before meeting me, and that when I walked up to him in the park for the first time, he recognized me because I was literally the woman of his dreams, or the guy who dated for a week who told me I was the one and that he never felt a connection this powerful.

These are lovely men, every one of them, I think. I don't actually know them. Now, Baker is one of the producers of our program. Coming up, working a hotline, we help people who are in desperate need and realizing doing one of the calls that you recognize the voice of one of the callers. That's in a minute.

Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program making the cut in this difficult moment that we are all living through with a pandemic and the economy the way it is, we have stories of people who need stuff and how it's decided who's going to get the stuff they need. We have arrived at Act three of our program, Act three reluctant bureaucrats.

So when producer Katie Mingle started to put together a series on homelessness for the podcast, 99 percent Invisible, she learned that if you're homeless in the Bay Area, the first thing that everyone tells you is to call this hotline to one. That's how you get access to shelter or housing.

Says you would hear about this hotline all the time from people who are experiencing homelessness there.

Usually when people mentioned it, they were frustrated. They would say, I called the number, it didn't help. I didn't get anything.

And she wondered, what is going on here? So over the past few months, Katie spent some time with the two one one operators as they took calls, and it turns out whether you get access to certain kinds of help depends on exactly how homeless you're considered to be.

Not everybody makes the cut. Here's Katie Rucyahana, Robinson used to answer two on one calls from a small office about halfway between Oakland and San Jose. Now, because of covid, she takes the calls from her dining room table. If there's time between calls, she moves around the house like a hummingbird, prepping food for dinner, proofreading her daughter's homework, doing sit ups. Two and one is a crisis hotline for people in need since covid, they've been getting more calls than usual from people who are hungry or need help paying bills or rent, the operators can refer them to programs that might be able to offer assistance.

I talked to a homeowner the other day. For almost an hour, losing her home, talk to someone else that owns a daycare, losing it may lose your house, said she's losing her mind. Devastating. It's devastating cause now it's a lot more work.

Non-stop. Alameda County, the one one, how can I help you, the most common reason people call both before and after the pandemic is homelessness two and one can find a shelter bed for the night.

If there are beds available, often there's not a good day.

They may have four or five to offer this in a county where there are at least 8000 people homeless on any given night before callers seeking something more permanent, like longer term housing. There's not much of that either. But two and one can help get callers on a list. Maybe it all depends on how they answer one question.

And where do you sleep Thursday? Last night here, Rucyahana is screening a caller to see if she qualifies as literally homeless. You're literally homeless. According to the county guidelines.

If last night you slept in a shelter or in some place not meant for human habitation, like a tent or a car.

But the caller, she's been couch surfing for the past few weeks. And last night she tells her, Sharna, she slept in a motel paid for by herself or.

Yes, the caller says paid for by herself. But that's not the answer Rusciano needs. So she can't afford her on to the next step to get longer term housing. You're welcome. But.

This technicality, what does and doesn't qualify someone for housing. It's upsetting to the callers, it's upsetting to Rossana to she thinks about it even when she's not at work, like we're at McDonald's and my sister in Union City, that Motel six, it's always all type of action over there.

I see this family going in there and I see them packing all these bags, three or four kids.

Right. And it's like. Oh, they are homeless, but they can't get help. Yeah, that's fucked up. And these are the kind of people that will call me and I say, can't help you because you stay in their own. Last night, it's sad and that's why I hear you, I feel you. I know you're homeless. I'm not saying you're not, but Alameda County guidelines. These are the stipulations. If colors meet the definition of literal homelessness, they can go into the system and be put on the list there, they get ranked by how needy they are.

The people considered most in need might get housing in two or three months, but a lot of people just languish at the bottom of the list, never get anything and end up calling to one one again.

It can be a maddening cycle and sometimes people get so exasperated that they yell at Rucyahana. She tries to listen, not take it personally and move on to the next caller, not get too attached.

But every once in a while, a caller will stick with her, Sharna, long after she hangs up.

I've heard her call names of folks she talked to months ago. And in January of last year, she had a call she still thinks about. Good morning.

Thank you for coming on. Let me take this one. I can help you. I'm homeless at Alameda County with a two year old son, and the caller sounded familiar to Rossana.

She said she and her son were homeless and looking for help and buy like a shelter that provides some type of like housing. Afterwards, I'm like, I just need some resources, but I'm willing to move anywhere that I can get help. Rossana starts asking her usual questions. Have you called two on one before? What's your phone number? What's your name?

My first name is. And my last name is. Now Rucyahana knows why the voice sounds familiar and you can hear her take it in, the person she was talking to was her cousin. The two hadn't seen each other in a long time and her cousin didn't seem to realize she was talking to Sharna, OK.

Oh, one moment she puts her cousin on hold and turns to her co-workers.

Fuck, this is my cousin. She tells them when she gets back on the call, she seems not to know what to say at all. Like she's lost the script completely.

Oh, finally, she recovers a bit, makes her way through the screening questions and Dorning friends or family could stay with.

No, Rucyahana wants to tell her cousin it's her, but they're deep in the call and she doesn't know how to say it, so she sticks to the script.

It's now nine minutes into the call and she's finished with the screening interview.

OK, so you have been determined to be literally homeless. About the county guidelines, you have been determined to be literally homeless, ReShonda tells her that since she's literally homeless, she can pass her through to the next step.

She might eventually get some help. And in the meantime, there's one space available in a shelter in Oakland that she could go to right away.

OK, so does this shelter. How long can I stay in the shelter for? It just depends, it just depends. They're. Finally, Rusciano finds the words, this is tiny, Tiny is Rosanna's nickname.

This is why they're so discombobulated right now. You're messing me up right now. Oh, yeah, I'm dead serious. Nothing so bad. This is not supposed to happen to all, but. And so I guess I'll take the number to the once and then. All right. Hi, Tony.

I know for the next few minutes, the two cousins catch up a little, both eluting in vague ways to difficult and complicated family history.

It may have been hard. Yeah, man, I know. I know. I was just talking to the ice guys yesterday. It'll get better for you. It definitely you know, you see me still to be a go getter and this is the way to do it.

I mean, you know, it's got to be you know, Roseanne is not the only two on one operator to know someone who became homeless.

Nearly all the operators who work for Alameda County, two on one are women of color.

And homelessness is disproportionately affecting black and brown people in the Bay Area. One operator named Gwen told me she'd been homeless herself for about five years, not that long ago. At the end of the call, Rossano transfers her cousin to the place where she can get on the list for help with housing.

I'm going to connect you. I got you connected, OK? OK. Yeah, no doubt. I'm going to text you mine. OK? OK. OK, I love you. I love you, too. All right. Looking back on that call, Rusciano recognizes that some of her hesitancy around telling her cousin it was her had to do with her own doubts around what she was ready to offer.

And I didn't really want to fully. At that point, I extend my hand as a place to stay because. I didn't feel like I was in the position to do that. I just don't want to be faced with that, because in my heart, I wouldn't have had the heart to be like, no, you can't come here. Roshan had been in this situation before, not with this cousin, but with another family member, and she knew once you invite someone in, you have to be willing to let them stay until they find another situation.

After that two on one call with Rossana, it ended up being about six months before her cousin was able to get herself back into her own place.

When these operators actually do have something tangible to offer their callers, they jump at the chance at the end of one of our workdays, Rosanna answers the phone for a caller who needs a shelter bed tonight.

Luckily, she's just gotten word that five beds have opened up in a shelter in Oakland.

So she has something to offer. Only there's a problem.

The client is across town at a kidney dialysis center and needs to be at the shelter by six p.m. It's currently around 10 minutes after 5:00.

So you need to get over to LCP by 6:00 p.m.. Is there anyone there know calm down, calm down is OK, is there anyone there that would be willing to give you a ride? No, no, no. Six, six, yes, six tonight, this caller, his name is James Reese, was panicking. If he couldn't get into the shelter, he imagined he'd have to sleep outside that night.

No one here. There's no one here. Help me. Um, let me let me play you on a quick call to see what I can do about transportation.

OK, let me play the two and one.

Operators don't really have a budget to help callers with transportation, but there is this very small fund, Rucyahana tells me, for Lyft rides, although she doesn't think this situation meets the criteria to use the funding.

You don't have a way to even take the bus. How mysterious.

No, I really don't. Trying to help me and I appreciate so much.

Rusciano puts Mr. Reese back on hold and opens the app for Lyft on her computer. Her brow is furrowed. Her cursor is hovering over the request ride.

But she says to me, this is where the humanity comes into it. Most of the day it's do you fit the criteria or not? Call the number, read the script, go through the protocols. But now she's going to make her own decision.

Doing OK, Mr. Reese.

Come get you a right.

It's rare having a problem she can solve, even if it means bending the rules a bit.

Mr. Reese has 40 minutes to get to the shelter, but it's a 30 minute ride with traffic.

You'll be getting picked up in three minutes by Ricardo. He's driving a white Honda Accord.

OK, OK, I'll be sitting in the lobby. Have a good night. Bye bye.

Rusciano hangs up the phone, but on her computer screen we can see that Ricardo, the driver, has pulled up to the address Mr. Reese gave. He's just sitting there. Why is Ricardo just sitting there? If Mr. Reese is in his car, he's waiting.

He's going to be. Hello. Hi, Mr. Reese. He's there. OK, I'm coming out. I'm coming out right here. OK, you may want to hurry. OK, ok. OK. OK.

Thank you, Mr. Reese. He's now left and the right was canceled. Huh? No, no, I'm right here. Hold on one second.

She puts him back on hold. I'm not sure if she's going to get him another lift or if that was his one chance. It's five thirty. He'd already be late, but maybe not too late. Rucyahana tries again.

Wrobel in a green Toyota Prius will be picking you up in six minutes.

Oh, hello. I'm still here. Mysteries. Oh, OK.

I have to stay on with you till you get in that car.

Five more minutes. Well, I would still be late. Oh, come on, car, OK. Oh, he's there.

He's waiting for you. Green Toyota Prius. Oh, man, I am. OK, Mr. Reese, you may have to walk around and look for a green Toyota Prius. Come on, let's look for the vehicle.

That's OK. Yes. So you can get in there.

We can see the driver's blue dot hovering on the screen, circling the block, but they don't seem to be finding each other.

OK, let me try to call the driver. Hold on one second.

There are four more agonizing minutes of back and forth on a conference call between Rucyahana, Mr. Reese and Wrobel, the Lyft driver.

Mr. Reese is describing landmarks, describing himself. Finally, they find each other in the car.

You're in the car like perfect. You're going to be a few minutes late. But just calmly explain that you were told to come.

He thinks her she hangs up, OK? He's on his way. Well, yeah, good. That's that's a good thing. I guess that's what keeps you going. Even if it's one person that gets a place inside tonight, it's like.

Getting Mr. Reese to that shelter was one real thing before the day's end. One person who Rossana knew for sure wouldn't sleep outside that night. It doesn't always go like that. I hadn't thought about it that much before this. But bureaucracies aren't just frustrating for the people trying to navigate them. They're frustrating for the people working inside of them, too. No one really has any agency no power to make a decision that could really help someone. All the operators told me the best calls are like this one when they feel like they actually have something to offer.

But calls like this are rare. Mostly, Roshan's has to be the voice telling people they're not going to get what they need, not right away and maybe not ever. Katie mingle. She's normally a producer for the 99 percent Invisible podcast, though she just released an entire series on homelessness in the Bay Area.

It's called According to Need. It has big fans on our staff. You can check it out on the 99 percent invisible podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, my God. I hope I get it. I hope I get it. Look at all the people and all the people. How many people does he need? How many? I really need this job. Please, God, I need this job. I've got to get. What program was produced by the people who put together today's show include beer, Matawan, me own a baker, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dennis Shivashankar, all of you with the Kornfeld, Hillary Elkin's, no guilt.

Your grave, Hanafi Wildstar Nelson, Catherine Reymundo, Nadia Raymont, Ari Sapperstein surpassingly was Sullivan, Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney and Diane Wu, our managing editor. Sarah Abdurrahman, our senior editors, David Kestenbaum, our executive editor, is a manual, very special. Thanks to Lisa Pollak.

With me, Henry Lester, Abby Meudon, Allison DeYoung, Ian Finance, Andrew Collins, Kelsey Padget and Simon Adler and Molly Webster at Radiolab, our website, This American Life Dog, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free.

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The Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always. The program's cofounder, Mr Malatya. You know, he always notices the little things started rolling the bottom of my pants in a new way. He is not into it.

That's like an extreme kind of IRA Glass back next week with more stories of this American life. What does. So many places all around and here we go, Pinay. Oh. Next week on the podcast of This American Life growing up black in Russia, Lena always dreamed about who she might marry if she came to America one day, that he'll be tall and black.

And whose song was that?

And then visit to America, which is last filled with princes that a person might think.

That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.