If looks could kill, I'd be a smoldering heap of ash. If you like true revenge stories, you found the best place for your vengeful needs. In this episode, we start off with a story about pirate neighbors, who are illegally broadcasting Dutch terror music. The suffering neighbors make sure to return the favor without holding back.  Lastly, a story about noisy neighbors messing with the wrong neighbor, who nudges the abomination that is bureaucracy and pointed in their direction, swallowing them whole. Make sure to give the like button a vengeful death stare. Let's dive in. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts might be disturbing to snowflakes. As we found out that we'd be expecting, not one but two kids, we knew we had to move to a real house with more space. At the time we were still living in a one bedroom studio, one up from the ground floor. With its only entrance being a metal fire escape stairs. Not ideal for a pregnant woman, let alone to live with two small babies. So, we found a privately leased house that was newly renovated and had all the room and a large garden we were looking for. Signed the lease and immediately collected the keys. As the owner drove off, the woman next door comes up to me.  So right of the bat we knew, trouble incoming. As the house was fully renovated and not much had to be done, we were like, let's not poke the bear, we'll do the things that make noise after noon. We moved in after two weeks and the whole street was warm and welcoming. My wife was almost due giving birth to my twin daughters, and some offer help with anything we needed, real kind people. They also told us about our neighbors. Nobody liked them. He was a big bully and got into arguments with everybody. Also were known as radio pirates, as in illegal broadcasting on radio with all Dutch bangers, this music is just terror on your ears and possibly used on terrorist black sites. This went alongside them partying Thursday through Sunday till five in the morning. Loud music, constant yelling, always drunk, you get the picture. Really something to look forward to when moving in, certainly with two babies on the way. The partying began immediately, full blast. Real classy for someone demanding to be quiet when douchebag needs his beauty sleep. Then one day, my father-in-law came to put new grass in. He has his trailer parked at the back of our houses, which is public space. Not according to him though, know that exact spot where the trailer was parked, was his spot and we had to move the trailer. Not going to happen, as I was not planning to walk all the way around the house with the sods. He gets angry right away and demanded me to move it, I told him to go freak himself. I was done with him already then and there. I'm also a ginger, so besides having no soul, I do have a temper which is always in check until you provoke me repeatedly.  We went on working and the end of the day comes when my father-in-law wants to leave.   I ran outside and told him in no uncertain terms to back off or he'll be the sorry one. Total bluff on my side, yes I have that temper but I'm not impressively built and have no hidden fighting skills, but if I have two, I do fight dirty.  She got scared of him potentially doing something to her father or me, and this is something we don't need right now. Combined with hormones from being pregnant and you can paint a picture. So I'm even more pissed, but had to promise not to act on anything. I won't, dear, not yet anyway. Time went on without any real incident and then came the time my wife goes into labor. Didn't go smooth and ended up having to deliver with C-section, because daughter too was almost strangled by the umbilical cord. We had to stay three nights, excruciating nights due to a lot of things. Finally we get to go home, family had put a giant sign in our front yard welcoming the babies. The sign was already up for a few days prior to coming home, so our friendly neighbors definitely knew about it. But did they give a flying frick? No, they did not. From the first night on they started to party and broad blasted their terror music, they started at noon and continued to until five or six in the morning. Classy. They also kept going for days, so it wasn't just Thursday Sunday, it was all week long and the next. So we were broken, hardly slept, one of our daughters suffered from heavy cramps combined with all the noise and her parents at the end of their wits, so she cried a lot. And then I just had it. I researched some things on radio pirates, the laws and regulations and on his large five meter antenna in his backyard which was illegal in itself. But he used it to illegally broadcast on radio which meant he had a lot of equipment to do so, which was even more illegal and can even get you jailed, but at the very least they could seize it all and fine him big time. In the 10 to 45k area. Now, I did not immediately turn him in, but instead went looking for another house to lease first. This because I figured it wouldn't sit well with him and having a wife and two babies in the house alone during the day, because I had to go to work. I hear you guys thinking, why not involve the police? They are utterly useless in cases like this. We called once and what they did disturbs me to this day. They rang at their doorbell and immediately started off by saying we called them about noise complaints. Yes, you read that right. No protection or whatsoever, just blatantly told them we were the reason they're there, told them to keep it down and that was it. They didn't even follow up with us or anything. As you can guess, douchebag now was even more pissed and told me the next day, we're yelled over the fence that separates our backyards that I really should not do that again, a threat yet again of which I told the police. I didn't report it the first time as I chalk that up to alpha male and heat of the moment. But without witnesses to corroborate, nothing could be done yet again. Some days later, I walked out the front door and he just stepped out of his car.   And then a light bulb went on above my head. I told him politely that I would do that immediately. Why? Because that gave me the opportunity to find out the make and model of this antenna to ascertain its signal strength, where the cables go exactly and what kind of cables there were, again to know the signal strength that handled. Also, it gave me a good view on the equipment he had, so I could snap some photographs of it. This was the icing on the cake. Because in the meantime, we did manage to find a new home and already had signed a lease so we would be gone in two weeks. Luckily we only had to paint some walls for the girls' room and furthermore just pack up our things and move them to the other house. So after I trimmed the ivy and collected my evidence, I went online that night to find out the proper channels to report a broadcast pirate and which entity was tasked with catching said pirate. Turned out I had to call the telecom agency, but also the police. Wasn't too happy with the latter. But I remembered I have a nephew that works for the police, officially his area was immigration, but knew enough colleagues that could help us and we could trust not to confront them again saying I was the one that sent them. That was extremely important for our safety when doing what I was doing. So I gave both the agency and the police all evidence I collected, pointed them to the frequencies he pirated so they could listen in. Then they started a neighborhood investigation, which wasn't really necessary, but this was to cover our asses to make it look like he got caught by accident, because they had an active investigation in our area. You never know what he can learn from legal documents and such. We asked them to wait with the raid, yes they raid pirates houses, preferably in the early hours of the day because of his beauty sleep, rendering him incapable of fleeing or hide evidence etc. We moved two weeks later and they raided him two days after we moved. All of his equipment, computers, radios, cell phones and his car were seized. He left in cuffs, his wife did too, for making a big scene and tried to interfere. All of which was life reported to me by one of my ex-neighbors who were equally ecstatic about this. It turned out, this wasn't the first time he got caught but his third time, his car had no insurance on it and failed the vehicle safety test. This would normally have no big consequence, because he didn't drive it while raided, but they had the guy surveilled on for a week and that definitely meant he was seen driving it while not having insurance or safety approved. He was fined somewhere around 30,000 euros, went to jail for 12 weeks and everything seized was destroyed except the car. His wife got to do 40 some hours community service. They had to sell the house, which made for very happy neighbors as they too were over and done with them. Like I said, I do fight, but very dirty. You have to really make an effort for me to get to that point, they did and suffered. Over a year later when shopping groceries I encountered them. With the foulest of looks, if looks could kill, I'd be a smoldering heap of ash. This is a brilliant revenge story, so settle back and relax. This one comes from my boss, who lives in the small town where it occurred. To set the stage, many decades ago, Barney and Betty immigrated from Europe and bought a farm. A few years later they had kids, and sponsored Wilma from the old country as a nanny. She met Fred, a local boy, fell in love and got married. Wilma stayed on as the nanny, and Fred worked as a farm hand. Their kids and Barney and Betty's kids grew up together, and it was pretty much a big, blended family. Years go by, and Barney and Betty decide to sell the farm fields to Farmer Frank, but kept the land the house was on. They made enough off the sale to build a nice, new house, and rezone the property lines. They broke the lot up into two parcels, one for the new house, and one for the existing house, which they gifted to Fred and Wilma as a recognition of their years of dedicated and loving service. Both houses shared a well and a septic field. More time went by. Barney and Betty passed away, and their house was inherited by their son, Bam Bam. Fred also passed away, and Wilma stayed in the house. She was an angel. Everyone in the town knew and loved her, she was like the town's grandmother. She was active in the church, and liked nothing more than crocheting booties for anyone in town that had a baby. Sadly, Wilma passed away too, and her house was inherited by her daughter, Pebbles. She was well established in a nearby metropolitan city, and made the decision to sell the house. And so the trouble begins. To give you a better idea of the setup. Here is a rough diagram. The parcel for sale is the yellow bit, which backs on to protected park land, and is bordered by Bam Bam's land, and farmer Frank's fields. It was purchased by a builder from the city, which will call Dick. The name suits him. He wanted it as a country getaway, as he already had a place in the city. He got approval to improve the place, and his plans were to convert the barn into a multi-car garage with a man cave and an apartment in what was the loft. He started by tearing down the house, with plans to replace it with a bigger, more modern house. The house was torn down, and the new build was started. The lower part of the yellow represents a very narrow driveway, between that driveway and farmer Frank's field was a drainage culvert. So the contractors started parking their vehicles on Bam Bam's lot. Bam Bam asked the contractors not to do it, but they didn't stop, so he approached Dick, and the conversation didn't go well. Dick was an entitled big shot, dealing with what he thought was a country bumpkin. To give you an idea, Dick once went to the local diner, and asked for the wine list. He was aggressive and disrespectful, and this pretty much set the tone for all future interactions. Bam Bam had enough, these contractor trucks were tearing up his ground, so one weekend, he built a fence along the border between his house and Dick's. It wasn't a complicated fence, he just got a buddy with a post hole digger on his bobcat, sunk posts, and strung planks between them. This caused no end of trouble with the build. There was no room to park in the yellow for the contractors without getting in each other's way, and they couldn't park in the driveway which was only wide enough for one vehicle at a time.  They had a long walk from the road to the build site, and had to carry tools and equipment back and forth, either that, or take turns dropping materials. Waiting hours for the carpenters to finish unloading the lumber so that the plumbers could unload the pipes. Dick was furious, and came stomping over to Bam Bam demanding that he dismantle the fence.  Then a day later, Bam Bam saw that someone had removed some of the fence and the contractor trucks were back on his land. Okay, thought Bam Bam, let's play. The following weekend Bam Bam irrigated the area where the contractors were parking. Irrigated it long and continuously. He probably had to get a water delivery to make it happen, as the well had a limited capacity. On Monday, the first contractor to arrive turned off Dick's driveway to go through the fence, and immediately sank up to his axles in mud. Did I mention that Bam Bam owned the local service station, and knew every tow truck company within 100 miles? As it turned out, everyone they called was too busy to pull the truck out, and they had to call a tow truck from the city, almost two hours away. You can see how the relationship between Bam Bam and Dick became somewhat less than neighborly. Time went by, and Dick's house was completed. It was a low maintenance setup, with interlocking brick over the compound, tall hedges separating Dick from Bam Bam. They kept out of each other's way, but they certainly weren't pals. Dick's kids would come up on the weekend and have a party now and then, but Bam Bam put up with it. One issue that arose was when Dick decided to fill the small swimming pool that he had installed. This drew the well dry, and caused some sand to be pulled into the water treatment equipment. When Bam Bam approached Dick about the cost of the repair through email, Dick basically replied that it was Bam Bam's problem. The same when the septic holding tank needed to be pumped. Bam Bam offered to split the cost of the pumping, and Dick refused to part with a dime. Years passed, and Dick decided to list the house for sale. That's when Bam Bam made his move. He cut the water and capped the septic line leading from Dick's house. Then he informed the real estate agent of what he had done. Well, that induced a thunderstorm, for sure. There's no way Dick could sell a house that had no water, or any way to dispose of waste. He couldn't build a septic field on his property, it was too small. He approached Farmer Frank to buy some of his land, but was rebuffed. His only option would have been to install a septic holding tank, but the only place to put it would have been right in the middle of his compound, and septic tanks can be quite aromatic. It would also have meant removing the in-ground pool. Dick tried to argue in court that he was entitled to access to the well water and the septic field. But Bam Bam won, arguing that Wilma and Fred were given water and septic as a courtesy, and that there was no contractual obligation to provide Dick either well water or septic access. There was nothing in the deed to Wilma and Fred that could be grandfathered in, and Dick's emails refusing to pay for maintenance to either system was the nail in the coffin. The property sat vacant and unusable for months. The price dropped through the floor, and the few people that expressed an interest in the property approached Bam Bam with varying offers of cash to restore service. Bam Bam declined. No offers were made to Dick for the house. Finally, Dick did receive an offer from a numbered corporation, an offer that was about a quarter of the asking price. As is, with a statement that the buyer was aware that there was no water or septic service to the property. Without much choice, Dick accepted the offer. And that's how Bam Bam bought himself a beautiful, modern country home, at a steal of a price. He reattached the water and septic in an afternoon, and moved his furniture down the driveway. He rented his old house out, for extra money, and had the numbered company negotiate with, himself, for an arrangement for perpetual use of the well and septic. Thereby jacking the value of the house by a factor of four. Later, if he decides to sell it, he'll be making a massive profit. Bam Bam now enjoys a country paradise, and is the social king of the hill in his town.  This is a story of how patience is key, and how letting someone else get revenge for you is by far easier than doing it yourself. I live in one of those doubled up houses where they build two houses adjacent to each other with mirrored layout, so we share a wall but are otherwise completely separate. For years, the house next to me belonged to a nice old lady who you never really noticed or had any trouble with. When she died and the house was resold, the troubles began. The target is someone who I will refer to as Jack Sparrow, for reasons that will become clear later. Jack owns a sizable construction business, does some real estate on the side. He buys the house and rents it to a bunch of foreign construction workers that work for his business. I say foreign, because it is relevant to the story. There are rumors jack is doing some shady stuff to have these work for him dirt cheap, by claiming that they're national workers in their native country, and paying them according to that wage, and not the much higher minimum wage of my country. Not exactly on the up and up. Possibly unreported labor as well. Anyways, he stuffs four to six of these in said house for them to live while they work here. Now I do not have anything against foreign construction workers. But these guys living next door have two traits that are very problematic, they are extremely loud and they do not give a frick about anyone else. We're talking nonstop music and partying, starting Thursday evening throughout the entire weekend, until they leave at 5 AM Monday morning to go to work. Seriously I don't know how or when they sleep, it is literally nonstop. We're talking, I'm wearing headphones but still cannot hear my own sound over their music loud. Since it would appear that they've designated the living room, adjacent to the shared wall, as the party room where the fun happens.  After the third one in a row, I go over to ask them to turn it down, since you know, night disturbance. It's technically illegal to blast music this loud, terrible on the street and across the street by my other neighbors who have also complained. I'm met with a half hearted so sorry, will fix. Except nothing changes. I go over several more times, each time angrier, each time met with, but it's not loud. If I can hear your music in my own house, over my own TV and music, I would say that it is in fact, too loud. I contact Jack, since he is their landlord, and explain the situation, after which I met with an abrupt. Sorry not sorry, not my freaking problem. Basically Jack told me to get fricked.  After about a dozen calls, sometimes even twice in the same night, it is clear that even regular police interference doesn't help the situation. I should mention that I am a lawyer, so I know what the next legal steps are. I also know that other than a token paper from a judge saying their music is too loud, I'm not really going to get anything.  I'm deadlocked with my only further option being pretty useless and a waste of time. At this point, I'm biding my time and just waiting till something changes. I'm not saying that I condone people who bludgeon their neighbor to death with a rusty pipe, but I do somewhat understand what would drive someone to that point. One day, I'm at home and I notice quite a lot of ruckus next door, more so than usual. Suddenly, I see through my garden window that a wall is being partially torn down. You see, sometime over the years, the neighbors had built a small adjacent side building adjoining the main house. It was right on the border between us, and when the gardens were being refenced, the wall was used as a divider to save on fencing. Said wall was now in the process of having its top part ripped off by a crane. I was not informed of any of this, which, while not technically needed, would have been the nice thing to do. I go take a walk so I can take a look at what we're doing and see that they've torn down the entire side building, the remaining wall between our gardens is the only part that has been kept intact, and even then, not the top part. Being a lawyer, and specifically, a construction slash permit lawyer, I know two things, do-do like this is not allowed without a pre-approved permit from the city. There is no way in how they have said permit, as I would have seen the application for it, I regularly have to check the public online application to see what permits are being applied for my job, and what I do I tend to look over to my own area, just so I can keep up with what is being planned in my area. This is it. The moment I have been waiting for, the situation has changed and the time has come to exact revenge. A quick email sent to the municipal authorities lets me do my civic duty of reporting a potential crime, the fact that someone is building or demolishing without a permit. Since this is a simple report, no response happens since I'm not an official victim or anything yet. Since no further construction happens for a few days and everything was removed, I assume that was that and they would only tear down the side structure, since it was starting to fall apart due to age. Neighbors have moved all their stuff that was in said building onto their lawn and haphazardly covered it with a tarp. The next week, more construction materials are being delivered and construction starts. I send a new email to city services, with new pictures, saying that apparently, there is more planned, and that I hope they undertake the appropriate action. Instant response less than an hour later, they'd called Jack after the first time to inform him that what he was doing required a permit, and he had ensured them that he didn't know that. B.S., he's in construction, of course he knows, and that he would stop construction and request a permit. They called him again after my email, reprimanded him for not following his earlier promise and he said again he would shut it down. I happened to be working from home that day, and had to stop myself from waving to the construction crew as they left. Later that day, I get an angry phone call from Jack, who accuses me of reporting him and that I would be sorry. He would come after me for damages for his delays. I respectfully inform him that even if I reported him I wouldn't have done anything wrong. Because from the looks of it, he didn't have a permit and should have known that before he started working illegally without one. I end the call before I start to sound too happy with things. Jack has at this point, no idea what I have initiated with this. He is Jack Sparrow and I have just rung the bell that awakens the Kraken that will destroy him, he just doesn't know it yet. You see, there is a good reason why most people consult an expert and or a lawyer when they want to apply for a permit. The rules involved are so convoluted and needlessly complex that navigating them as a non-professional is extremely hard and time-consuming, and a single mistake can torpedo your entire case, forcing you to do it all over. I have killed entire projects and have seen clients' projects killed, by pointing out that on page 127, section 351a, something was left blank that should have been answered. I did some digging and found out that the previous owners of the houses had actually consulted each other about the side building, and agreed on making the wall the divider between their gardens. So much so, that they shared the costs of it. And the ownership. That wall that he destroyed part of? It was also my wall. Which of course, means I'm entitled to damages, but that is not the important part. The important part is that he needs my permission, to do anything to that wall. So when he applied for a permit a few weeks later, I went to city center and looked at the application. Added bonus, neighbor's stuff is still out in the open, covered by just a tarp for weeks now, since they expected this to be a quick smash and replace job that would take a few weeks at most. When I went to look at the application, I noticed that they were planning to do some stuff to said wall that I owned 50%. So I filed a complaint, following proper procedure, about the permit, namely that even if granted, it could never be executed, since Jack needed permission for me in regards to the wall, and he didn't have it, nor was I intending to grant it. This should kill his permit, since permits cannot be granted if you know in advance they cannot be realized. No sense granting a permit to build a certain kind of house when you know they're never actually going to build it. Now, Jack was a bit of a smooth talker, and as a construction entrepreneur, had his connections, and permits are a political decision here just as much as a legal one. So despite a 100% correct legal objection that should have killed his permit, it went through. He actually called me about it to gloat a little. No worry, one can appeal a permit in my country. The only requirement is that you pay a 100 euro fee, which I gladly paid. The appeal instance is a subnational instance, and does not care one bit about Jack's political ties or the half-hearted bullcrap that the city officials wrote to justify granting the permit, in spite of the concerns I raised. They terminate his permit without any hesitation on the aforementioned legal grounds. Jack sees his permit blocked until he fixes the issue, which he can't, because I'm not really inclined to agree with his plans for our wall, you see. At this point, going through two lengthy procedures, it has been over seven months. The neighbors have had an unfinished construction project in their yard the entire time. They were forced to store their stuff elsewhere, something that was always supposed to be a temporary thing for a few weeks while we build, turned into something that was taking months, with no end in sight. But wait, there's more. The above was the administrative part of the matter, him getting the permit. Now doing construction work without a permit is also a criminal offense. And of course, my report got passed around to the appropriate instances, so now Jack was also the subject of a criminal procedure for construction offense. Not only did he risk fines and jail time, he was a construction business and used his own construction business for the work he did on the property. So his company was also on the hook, and one of the sentences that can be given in these types of crimes is to be prohibited to do construction or construction related activity as a business, either permanently or temporarily. Not only was he personally on the line, his entire business was as well. During this debacle, Jack tried to sell the property. This didn't really go too well because of a few reasons. One, the property was inflicted with an illegal situation, the demolished side building was torn down illegally, and until said illegal status was resolved, it would stick to the property. Which tends to kill the property value quite a bit, since nobody wants to buy something that they'll have to spend time and money on to make legal again, by either rebuilding the torn down building, or getting a regularization permit for it. Made even worse by the fact that he applied for said permit and had it denied, so he couldn't even claim that said permit would be super easy to get. Secondly, is Jack never intended to sell the property in its current state? What he has done in the past, is buy cheap old houses like the one next to me. He puts some of his crew in it, who can't complain about the sub-par accommodation. They thrash the place because they don't care and he lets them, then when the place is done, he tears it down and sells it to a developer or develops it himself. However, due to his construction crime and the accompanying status for the property, step two was not an option. He couldn't renovate it the way it needed to be, small renovations would not be enough, because covering the crime was always a requirement in any permit he would request for the building, and because of me, he couldn't cover it. Couldn't sell it either, because the place was trashed, and any developer looking it would dip out when they realized there was a construction issue and a vocal neighbor who would oppose anything big that they would try to do there, lost of easier properties to develop than that one. In conclusion anyway, that is where we are today. Jack is staring down the barrel of a criminal court procedure that is about to happen where he is risking his business and livelihood. His existing projects also gather special attention from city services now, since he is now outed to them as someone who cuts corners on permits and regulations. He cannot really sell the property unless he cuts a massive loss, since in its current state it is absolutely trashed. He cannot develop it or sell to a developer, because all development plans involve the adjoining wall, which he cannot use in big ways unless he gets my permission. The rowdy neighbors are stuck living in a smaller house than what they had, in a place they trashed but that cannot really be renovated or fixed in the major way that it needs. They have quieted down a lot, possibly because Jack blames them for his current situation, which isn't wrong, I suppose. I have awakened the Kraken and set it off on Jack Sparrow, and it utterly ruined him. And the best part is that I had to do very little to do it. All I really did was nudge the abomination that his municipal bureaucracy and pointed in his direction, and they did the rest. I could tell you that he called me to complain and even beg about letting him use the wall the way he needs it to, so that he can get on with his business and fix the issues and use them to show his good faith in court and the criminal procedure. That he was losing money and customers over this and was in danger of losing his entire business, and that I then smugly replied with, not my freaking problem. But he didn't, so for now we'll just have to imagine that he did. Thank you for enjoying this episode, which was made with artificial love. Subscribe or give royal ASMR sugar by avenging the like button. Could you imagine doing one of these acts yourself? Share your experience below. I'll join the conversation.


I'm sorry, somebody came up to me. Surprise! Even with my yen for them, it won't match what's on that table. But this is a jar with the crest on it and filled with jelly. The human institution will never be the same. Chief, I know this can make, it's going to be this much fun. I would have done this earlier. No, seriously though, I just want to say it's been a great experience. It's probably most of you know that I've been on leave for the last four or the last six years, involved in the campaign, the transition here, and it's been a great time. And it's been particularly great working for you. I've really enjoyed trying to help you achieve some of the things you're trying to do here. And I look forward to working with a lot of you in the months and years ahead because I don't really feel as if I'm leaving, I'm just sort of going to do something different for a while. Thank you. We have another gift that really is being presented from you also, besides, but this, we thought Marty, when you go back to Hoover and have all that time on your hands, that you might even take up drinking. And in case you do, we wanted you to have something to drink out of. That's a happy one. And we also had a presentation. Marty, on behalf of the Office of Policy Development, all the professional members of the staff, this is a gift from all of us to you. That's terrific. Use that for the best advantage of turning its face to the wall. It depends. All right. Well... Do you want some champagne? Thank you. This is the artist. He'd love to do this for you. Some day maybe. He's a wonderful man. He did it from a photograph and some day he'd love to do it. He captures the spirit of it. He's a wonderful man. Nice. Someone said that's not working. Thank you. Mr. President, Lieutenant Jack Cloud, the U.S. Park Police. Nice to see you. I had some jumpsuits. It's my sergeant, Bill Sampson. Nice to see you. This is Kyle Asda. Nice to meet you. Officer Wilber Land. Hello. Nice to see you. I'm Bob Hartley. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, sir. How are you doing? I look lame and I don't. Ron Gaelic, Mr. President. I'll put you covered. Perfect. Sir, I'd like to thank you for what you've done for a year now and our own support since we've been here. Of course, I'm a TV fan of two of you. I want to turn on this. It's been an honor for us to assist in any way we can. Our security and cabinets are very happy to do it. We're most grateful. Don't find it. Nobody right now. I'm a sergeant. I've seen it. Certainly around. I'm most grateful. It seems to have been working quite well. We haven't done it as much in the past. The single service seems very happy with it and we haven't done it as much. We didn't live in a kind of world where that's necessary. I look through some of the old books up there, Stairs in the White House and see pictures of presidents that used to be able to drive down through the town and the crowds and open cars. I guess a few people allowed it. You could even walk. I remember I've been around here for quite a while. President Kennedy on Sunday mornings used to jog around the yard and he would always run out the northwest gate in a shorts and t-shirt without secret service and looked at the corner of a rug store that was there then and sat there and had his Danish and got the coffee and read the paper and the secret service caught up with him. Well, I then read about what happened when the river Harry Truman one day sneaked out and crossed Lafayette Park and went to church while by himself sat through church and won't pay any attention to it. I got back and it was hard. I have to. I've got to look around first. I have to tell you, President of California, one of my favorite stories that happened there because I was governor in the time of the riots and all the campuses and so forth. Wherever I went, I didn't ask whether there would be demonstrators. I said, which ones? One night I was going down to a little town in Modesto, California speaking to the band code there where these people in a small community had by themselves raised money, helped to build a very fine medical institution and well, circling the block in his car. So now they're waiting for him, but he doesn't come around again. So they put out an all-points bullet before he can be picked up, he's back circling the block and the next time around they stop the car, they drag him out over the hood and he knows, he understands what it's all about. But his line is what I remember. You'll have to cut this off the tape. He said, that was no, no. He says, you got me all wrong.  Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. I got those too many. I hope you don't need us. Pleasure. Jack, pleasure.


Our last presentation for this session will be by John Garansson, Swedish nurse currently working with MSF in Erbid, Jordan on a third mission with MSF bachelor's degree in nursing from Red Cross University College of Stockholm. Thank you very much for that introduction. Hello everybody. So what I'm going to say here is much linking on to what Philippa already is talking about. So we're talking about meeting the health needs of syno-refugees in Jordan and the novel model of non-chemical disease care that we have implemented in this setting. So a lot of the background will be a bit addressed. So there's around 600,000 syno-refugees in Jordan and most of them are living in the northern parts and you already addressed for what the impact of NCDs in this group. What we haven't really touched base is that most of these diseases are not infectious. They're caused by mostly lifestyle. They're caused by obesity, smoking and inactive lifestyle. And in Syria, a third of all women are obese and a fifth of all men are obese. 60% of all men is smoking. It's an epidemic. And by actually targeting these areas we can actually prevent stroke, heart disease and diabetes type 2 up to 80%. So the objective of this study is to explore the novel model of NCD care and its early clinical outcomes. We're also exploring the feasibility of using motivational interviewing on lifestyle changes in syno-refugees and also its early outcomes. We've used the retrospective descriptive study to be part of the study. We picked the first 400 diabetes type 2 and hypertension patients. We've also analyzed routinely collected data and analyzed it with the PERT test. So the intervention is of course the most interesting part of this. So since the 15th of December we've been operational not for a long time. We are working together with the Ministry of Health. In addition to diabetes type 2 and hypertension that we're looking at in this study, we're also including COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and of course diabetes type 1. Here on the right you have our patient circuit and our model of care is it's nice because we're able to provide a lot of face time with the health care professional. We're actually providing 30 minutes of the first initial doctor visit, 30 minutes with the patient and additional in the health counseling additional 30 minutes. So they see a health care professional for more than one hour. We also have implemented the appointment system because I actually visited Lebanon in November and heard about their problem with defaulters. So we can actually report that we have very low default rates. 2.5 percent of our patients are completely lost to follow-up, an additional 2.5 around or voluntary exiting mostly because of moving back to Syria. But if we're talking about our patient court in total so we're looking at treating currently 1,600 patients after only four and a half months. 50 percent of them have more than one condition, 64 percent of them have diabetes type 2, an additional 54 percent has hypertension and it's really complex cohort. Staggering 60 percent of our patients are obese, 60 percent which means they have a BMI over 30. But this is the comes to the innovating part. I think change is difficult and I think that many people in this room would like to change something in their lives. I know I want to. And a way of approaching ambivalence towards change is motivational interviewing. It's a patient-centered coaching style that instead of imposing change on somebody it looks at ambivalence and let the patients their own examine the individual process. We're working with creating the coaches are creating an environmental mutual trust and trying to support the patient in this process. We're using techniques that call the oars, open questions, affirmations, reflections and helping the patient by summarizing what they've actually said. So it's the patient talking, not the coach. After a while on the left side here we see different stages of change which the patient is constantly moving through. When after a while we always hear the patient starting saying I want, I would like, I should. This is where a patient's moving into a preparation phase from maybe starting pondering over over change and then moving into actually trying to do it. And here we support the patient by creating their own change plan, a concrete smart plan that's supposed to be achievable. So what did we choose this style? We chose it because it's proven to be effective in terms of reducing BMI, body mass index. It's been proven to help with long-term smoking cessation and also increasing physical activity. But here comes how we adapted this to the context. It's not, there's not a lot of research on MI in refugee contexts. And what we have faced that we had to include treatment care supporters and family members a lot more in the sessions. The, for example, an old man wanting to change his dietary habits. We're not going to be able to reach him if he doesn't reach his wife because his wife is the one taking the decisions that are home when it comes to nutrition. So we had to include a lot more. In terms of human resources and training, all our coaches are nurses, trained, have an introduction, basic training and a motivational interviewing and we're focusing most on the spirit of MI. I'm going to address the challenges a bit later. So we come into the results and it's, as I say, very preliminary results, a short time period. I want to look at the upper line, which is systolic blood pressure, which is the most important factor when it comes to reducing mortality and mobility. We've actually had a significant drop from 144 to 136 in systolic blood pressure, which we can easily say we have taken our first 237 hypertensive patients from having uncontrolled hypertension to having controlled hypertension, which is quite an achievement in only four months. Looking at our HPA1C results, once again very preliminary data, so we've seen that we've had a significant drop. So for HPA1C is a long-term blood sugar test in the blood for diabetes patients. The cut-off point we want to be under is seven, quite not year. We'll be going in the right direction and hopefully this is only 84 patients, but we're hoping to provide better data soon. Here, stage of change. We're actually using this as a diagnostic tool. Our coaches are diagnosing the patients and where in this cycle they are. And we can see that we're looking from the slide from the left to the right, so we're looking at in the beginning 66% of all our patients wasn't even thinking about changing their life. After a couple of months, we see that patients are starting to thinking about it, starting actually preparing to change and actually changing, making changes in their daily life. The tricky part is, of course, maintaining this change in this way too early to come away and there will be conclusions. And I'm saying here, last visit. Last visit is because many of our patients have had different numbers of follow-up visits. Some have had three, some have had five, all depending on the complexity of their disease. Quickly going over lifestyle results. So we have not had any body mass index, significant changes yet. It's way too early and a lot of different confounders. We've looked at the patients that are actually in action phase and the lifestyle change. And we see that 38% of them are decreasing their smoking habit and 6% of them are stopping smoking right now. Comes to the physical level, we see that 28% of our patients are becoming more active and we're using the general practice physical activity questionnaire and diagnosing the different levels. We, of course, face challenges. We saw that with, many of our patients have a lower understanding on their disease process than we thought. And we have to start by talking about disease process, risk and complications before we can move into the actual lifestyle change. We have identified a lot of barriers towards change. Stress and trauma. Many of our patients are coming with better traumatic experience behind them. And many of them have families left in Syria, which is, of course, not a good foundation for change. Many of our patients say, I'm not going to change here. I'm going to change when I come back to Syria. Unemployment is illegal for refugees to work in Jordan, which is, of course, linked to the financial situation. Support from WFP and UNHCR is decreasing. And limited funds is not a good foundation to make, let's say, healthy choices in terms of diet and doesn't help with when nicotine substituted is three times the price than the actual cigarettes. I'm going to go quickly also to culture. So in terms of physical activity, it's not really built into the culture. Most of our patients are coming from southern Syria, Dada region. Women are not always acceptable walking outside. So we're trying to find even innovating ways of addressing this. A lot of limitations to the project also links into limitations to the study. It's a new context in this setting. We're in start-up phase. We're trying to set all the different systems in place. Short-time perspective, we already addressed the non-consistent follow-up duration. Staff has only had basic training, and the more time that goes, the more experience they get, and the higher the quality of motivational interviewing we can provide. We also had some issues in the patient file that could have implicated some of the data collection. Conclusions. So what can we say? We can say that a patient-centered model of care for NCDs appears to be feasible in a refugee context, and its early clinical outcomes looks promising. We can also say that motivational interviewing towards lifetime chains seems to be feasible and actually seems to improve motivation at this early point. We can also say that Syrian refugees are struggling with barriers towards change, and we have to find ways of addressing these barriers and taking them on. Come to the future. So we hope to provide a formal evaluation to be able to inform other NCD projects in similar settings. I'm saying similar settings, because Jordan and Lebanon are quite different settings that we normally work in. Hopefully also to provide outcome indicators and together work for our data tool, I would say for OCA. We're also focusing on trying to get health counseling guidelines for non-chemical disease care, which is not existent right now in our programs. A lot of people, as you can see, has been working together with me. I will now say a special thank you to Dr. Lars Failing, who started this project with me last year. The biggest thank you go to Dr. Rami Sugul, who is the man working on the data, and without him none of this would have been possible. Thank you very much, and let's open up for some questions. Your question, please. The technical questions. I'm Misha, working with the MSF Unitate Pool. I just had a question, because I assume that smoking activity is self-reported. How did you control for the reliability bias? Of course. That bias always exists, because it is self-reported and same with physical activity level. We're trying to develop an environment of trust with our patients in our sessions. They do come back regularly for every follow-up session. It's 15 minutes, so they get to see these patients through a long period of time and develop a relationship. Of course, that bias always exists when it comes to self-reported tools. I wish I could say that we had a magical way of not having that bias. Daniel O'Brien, just wondering in your smoking cessation, do you use nicotine replacement like patches? Because it would be quite, I haven't seen that used in MSF before. Yeah, so nicotine substitute we are not using. MSF is not providing this. Of course, that would be a big debate in MSF. We're starting to do that. But it is proven that 50 to 70% of our patients, all patients are helped with nicotine substitutes. Of course, that would be an added effect. But at this point, we do not do that. It's something that we're trying to discuss, or at least maybe targeting nicotine substitutes to the patients that are in action preparation phase, not to everybody, but to the ones who actually want to change that we can follow-up. Because they are three times more expensive than actual cigarettes. Any other question, please? Yes, please. Hi there. My name is Maverick from New Zealand, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I was just wondering, in terms of the obesity part of your study, did you involve the use of a dietitian at all? Or did you consider that? Because I guess in a lot of other studies like this, there's a lot of intensive kind of dietary change. And I was also wondering, I presume that the Syrian refugee's status makes also maybe food security an issue and accessibility? So our program is set up in that nurses are the coaches, but they are technically supervised by a dietitian who has hired us a health promoter who has given them and me training in how to eat properly. But as you said, there's a lot of barriers. WFP food ratios have been cut by half since November, and that makes it very difficult for patients to have enough money to actually make sound dietary choices. But we have a dietitian involved, yes. Last question, please. Hi, I'm Anna from Institute Pasteur. I'm just wondering, did you do any separation of looking at the time since seeking refuge or the time since arriving in the patients that you're looking at, and what their motivational levels were separating those groups out, stratification type? We have not done that yet. So we are looking at routinely collected data, and we have their, now we don't actually look at their arrival date into Jordan. That would be something interesting looking at, maybe for the future. Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you very much. Please join us here. I would like to invite the panelists to come here.


U.S. Ambassador to Japan, the Honorable Caroline Kennedy, visited Naval Beach Unit 7 to see the Land and Craft Air Cushions, or LCAC's, capabilities first-hand. Commander, it was great. I got to drive, and then we had a chance to visit with some of the sailors here who were doing an incredible job, and also to meet some of the mayors and officials from the base hosting community who are always great to support us. As an ambassador, part of Kennedy's job is to know the ins and outs of U.S. military and our capabilities within the region. We operate the LCACs, the LCUs, and we're the beach party team, and we were truly honored to be able to show her our command. The ambassador visited MBU-7 as part of a larger trip to Nagasaki Prefecture, where she met with students to encourage living abroad in the United States and attended a cultural festival. Petty Officer Christina Coffey, Fleet Activities, Sosubo, Japan.


I thought maybe we could start with your story. What's been happening in St. John'sbury, Jamie Dimmick? Well, it might be easier to say what's not happening in St. John'sbury. It's been a pretty incredible March and April. Kingdom Access TV, we always have a very busy March. We do a rotary basketball tournament. And in about 10 days, we turn out, I think it's 42 basketball games. So right as we finished that, the state gave a stay at home order. I think it was the Friday, and we did the finals on Saturday. But at that point, we just kind of regrouped, trying to figure out what we were going to do. And the next week on Wednesday, I think it was the 16th or 18th of March. Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium was going to do a live COVID-19 update with the local hospital. So I reached out to them at about 11 o'clock in the morning and said, would you like us to do this live? And they said, that would be great. So then I realized what I had said, and they had taken me up on it. So we very quickly had to figure out a way to go from YouTube to KTV to cable TV. And lucky for us, I think I'm guilty of never throwing anything away. And the people that work here would testify to that. So we dug around and found the equipment that we needed and put it together very quickly for 1 o'clock. And that really opened up an amazing partnership with Fairbanks Museum. To date, we've done, I think, 63 educational programs with the museum. We've been sending them out on VMX. Had tons of downloads, I think, over 600 downloads from VMX for those shows. And that's just been a great thing, keeping us busy, helping an institution in our community, and putting valuable stuff out there. That sounds great. Thanks for sharing that. Tammy Riley, you're down in Manchester. Gina, tell us how your organization has made the pivot in the last six weeks in terms of the service provided to the community. So of course, the first two weeks were crisis mode. And we were meeting on a daily basis as a staff and really trying to determine what is it that people need. And that took a couple weeks for everybody to get settled. What's been really interesting for us is we're seeing more community participation, I think, because people are willing to try something new because they have time, their schedules are disrupted. So we produce the news project. We produce regular weekly news stories. So we are a content producer. But what's been really interesting about what's happened over the last six weeks is that the disruption has allowed people to try new things.  And so that's really exciting. In particular, we reached out to the faith community because that was immediately a big need in the community. And so one of my producers is on the phone in Zoom daily with various faith leaders, helping them with Zoom, helping them with the iPad, sorting out internet issues. And I think that's really been huge. The other things we were doing, and I think we're sort of settled now, is reaching out to all the government entities, making sure that they could get their meetings covered and let them know that we were there and helping them in that way. And the other piece, which is always the most fun for me, is seeing the kids get involved. So we started a kids variety show where kids and parents can send in their own content and we put it together. So it took, everything takes longer than you wanted to, but we're kind of hitting our stride with all of this stuff. So that's sort of what's been going on here in addition to us producing regular news content via Zoom. It's been exciting. And it's exciting to see new people come into the fold with what we do and share their story and tell stories that aren't getting told otherwise. So that's what's making me excited. Thanks so much, Tammy. Jared, I understand that you put together a kind of musical concert away and obviously you're a musical man from your room. Yeah, yeah, this is my music room. It's still a challenge of getting the content I've been reaching out. My first attempt hasn't really, really worked out the way I've liked, but I do have some community members who are regular, who do music programs and I'm reaching out to them now to try to do something via Zoom. In the town I'm in, it's actually in a CATVs area, but there's a little tavern here that puts on a Zoom open mic, which is the kind of the same idea I've had. I've actually participated a couple of times. So I'm working on that aspect with the local musicians in Springfield, Chester. So yeah, so that's one of the biggest challenges I've found is we're thinking outside the box of how to get the content but still getting the community members to get the content created is still a bit of a challenge for us. But we're seeing that people are starting to gravitate towards Zoom, especially some of our studio shows that we had regular studio shows. I have a feeling some will probably say, you know what, I like doing this out of the living room of my home. Can we keep doing it this way? So I think that given this option, we will start to see more content via teleconferencing and stuff. So overall, I think that is one of our hardest challenges is just getting the people used to the idea, like, hey, you can still create content. You can still send it to us. And but we are seeing an uptick in that finally. And hopefully we're going to continue to see that. So but overall, we gravitated to the remote thing pretty well. I actually, literally the day before the stay at home order was put in place, I had met with my board and I had come up with like, well, if this situation happens, this is what me as the director is going to do. This is what my production coordinator is going to do. I had come up with a logistical plan saying, we will be able to work, but we're going to do it remotely. And it wasn't a day later that we were told, do not go into work. So overall, we were prepared. It just came a lot sooner than we were expecting. And there's some challenges to it, but we are making do. And Zoom has been, and teleconferencing has definitely been a big help in doing that. Thank you so much, Cora. Can you tell us a little bit how you've made the switch from a regular community media center to a remote media operation? To my operating at TV station from my basement. I wasn't going to actually say that. OK, yeah. That's what it is, folks. Yes, I mean like many of you and I got so many of our ideas from our daily, well, it started out as a daily van call. So I just really appreciate that. All that input was there because they gave me all sorts of ideas about what other stations were doing. We jumped in first on the municipal level because our towns were all at various stages of being able to go online. So we jumped in at the like, there was a hybrid phase where some people were meeting in the town hall and all spread out with our producer, spread out just zooming in. And then there was a hybrid phase where some people were online and some people in the room. And then there was the next phase where everybody got on to Zoom and our towns were on a whole like all of yours on a spectrum where some people were like, yeah, I do all this for work. I don't need any help. And we would just, we assigned a producer to sit in on the call and make sure that it got recorded and do a backup recording. You'll be using OBS or whatever it was. And then I still have a town now that's just like today is going to try and go online. So, you know, like, like you all know, we had a huge outpouring of interest in getting on BCTV as soon as we went offsite from local journalists who had like podcasts or interview shows on the radio or whatever. And they all just jumped on the bandwagon and they just started sending us shows. And so we became basically a like remote editing house and we still are. And normally this is something, you know, my motto for this period is no rules in the shutdown, which is we threw out all of our requirements, all of no releases and membership, nothing. Just send us that video. We will edit it. We will put it on. Make it happen. Like, and then we would identify sources like Tim Ashes' daily update on Facebook. And I would just put in his comment, hey, I'm from a local public access station. Can I download this, air it and put it up for other stations? And he'd be like, yes, that was it. You know, and then that just started to change. So we were basically looking for credible daily news sources and just getting a flood of people submitting shows to us. And that's still the way it is, where I'm seeing a live stream on Facebook or something and I'm saying, hey, can we air this? And they're like, yep, here's the video, you know. And so we're just doing, and it's been great because I can keep my editors employed. And I'm just saying, here you go. Here's this online content. Let's make it for cable. And that's a lot of what we're doing. We are starting to see, so municipal, all that happened. Church, you know, faith services, all that kept happening. They made the leap right away. Our weekly shows made the leap. We are starting to see requests now from arts organizations who are like, can you help us do a live stream concert? Something like that. So I can see that that's the next thing that we're gonna get into is arts organizations trying to figure out, how can I do a performance safely? And one of the ways I can do it is by not having the audience in the room. And I can see that there's a role for our organizations, you know, in that, that we're all gonna get. So I'm gonna just pause you because that's just a breathtaking amount of work to digest and everybody's editors have been doing this work. I know Angelique has a smaller center and I'm wondering what are you most proud of the change that you've made in your organization in the past six to seven weeks? Well, going remote was not that hard because we have a staff of basically there's three of us in the office. We did close pretty much right away, which was hard to imagine that just a few weeks before we'd had town meeting where everyone was crammed together in these little spaces, hard to imagine another lifetime. But we, so we switched to the remote and one of the things that was important for us was to keep sort of making sure the employees knew that their income was stable and our one full-time, well not full-time, but our field producer that she was taken care of. So that was very important during the transition, like, you're okay, things are changing, we're closing our studio, but you'll be fine. So that was very important for us. And we've really been focusing a lot as we have in the past on our towns. And a lot of our, in the past, we had sort of experimented with doing some meetings live and now everything is live. And now we're able to even offer to some committees and boards that we couldn't send people there to film in the past. Now we're like, give us your meetings. And they're like, we're not sure how to do it, but we've been holding a lot of hands and we love to do that. And they've been holding our hands, really working really closely with our three towns. So that's been nice that we felt like we've offered a little something new on both on the internet to offer these live and on our channel. Can I ask you, how have you kept the staff cohesive? I understand you have a small staff, but how are you balancing, how are you managing a remote staff? Well, we do have like a weekly talk where we chitchat with each other, but we've got a lot of, you know, just communicating in different ways whatever each person prefers. Yeah, it's turned out a little more, like whatever we had built on in the past. It's important to not over communicate just because you're far apart. You don't want to be like on someone's back all the time. So there's a little bit of holding back sometimes even though you really want to tell them about this latest thing. So that's, yeah. And I just wanted to mention one thing that we're talking about new things for doing this time. We're a non-commercial station so we don't run advertisements. But at this time, we felt it was really important all the work that our local businesses are doing. And it was a reminder of how integrated we're a non-profit, but you know, our world is the same. So we've been focusing on this new little series where people, our businesses become our businesses become film producers in a way and they use their cell phones and they film themselves like sort of behind the scenes doing what they do. And it's really distilled for us too how important their service is whether it's making chocolate, teaching Taekwondo or taking care of our animals. So that's been a really fun new thing that we're trying to produce. So it sounds like everyone has been doing different kinds of new partnerships that they might not have done as intensely before. Jamie, the Fairbanks Museum is one area. Are there other partners in the community that you are working with that perhaps you were not as intently with them before? I don't think so. What we found was that the usual amount of community events that we're going to go out and help produce in the community were going to be canceled. Those are going to be public events where there's a live audience. And so that was really strange to get a handle on the idea that, oh wow, this isn't going to happen. But like Angeliki was saying, we reached out to the Chamber of Commerce. We have two, Northeast Kingdom and St. John'sbury and asked if local businesses are providing a service for COVID-19. We'll help them if they can record themselves. We'll try to get resources to them. They can do Zoom. They can do any number of things. We'll take care of the rest. Just get it to us and we'll help put the message out there. So that was a little bit unusual. Like a lot of places, we kind of stay away from the profit world and the commercial and retail businesses. But considering the gravity of the situation, it was like, okay, let's go. Just bring it and we'll do it. And I guess the follow-up question I would have for everyone to think about is we have spent a lot of time moving online. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a bigger demand for actual television to put programs on TV versus just online. Is that for me, Lauren? Sure. Yeah. Well, I said to begin with that there's a lot of things going on. And just to remind anybody watching, in April, the Department of Corrections announced that 30 inmates were going to be moved to St. John'sbury. And the roof blew off the community. It was just absolute outrage that we were going to have 30 inmates come to a county, Caledonia County, with two cases of COVID-19. We're talking about a small rural hospital. If things get out of hand, this is going to be really difficult. No-brainer live TV for the Select Board meeting. That was Friday the 10th, I think, that they announced that. And we were live on the 13th with the St. John'sbury Select Board. And there was a lot of state house representation there, Department of Corrections folks, everybody and anybody, people from the community.  And then just a few days later, a week later, VSC announced that they were going to close or they had a proposal to close three campuses, including the former Linden State College or NVU Linden. And again, the lid blew off the community and away we went. So those things, it was just, we have to do this stuff live. We weren't really prepared in some cases to do that. But we just shoulder the grind. We'll make it happen. So Rob Chapman, you've just joined us. Welcome, or come up, Hillier. We've just been talking about the kinds of pivots that we've done in the last several weeks in order to serve the community. And being in Montpelier, you have some, a lot of experience in covering the legislature, but then all of a sudden, the legislature disappears. So what sort of adjustment did Orca make in order to bring the news of the governor's press conferences and the legislative activity to the wider community? So there were, I mean, those are two different questions. We had to deal with the legislature committees. I mean, we typically have this working paradigm where we would look at an agenda for the committees during the week, and then we would pick and choose based on the agenda items that we thought would be of interest, that might be in the news, that might be coming from the administration, and then send the camera operator there. And then all of a sudden that just blew up. And they were no longer there. We, you know, there was this slight transition when they were, we would send somebody to the house, chambers and like that, but it was getting more and more difficult to actually send camera operators. And they began to adjust to having their committee meetings remotely through a Zoom platform. And we had to begin to sort of look at the schedule and we began to follow the agenda. So we would look at what they had done by checking out what they'd done during the week through the Zoom. And then we had to figure out how we were going to capture that. So we had to obviously, like most of you, have gone through and adopted a platform where we have to take a Zoom or remote platform where that might be and then record that and then add branding to it. It took us about a week to sort of adjust to that new paradigm, but we were able to do it. And at the same time, we were setting up the network so that the staff could work remotely from their home, so which we've been doing for the past four or five weeks now, I believe. So, you know, we had a very frantic week there of just trying to adjust our workflow and our protocols and trying to figure out what to do with that. And then we got to the Governor's press conference, which was, you know, they originally had been handling it through the Governor's Facebook Live account, but they were having technical difficulties with microphones and such. So, you know, they decided that, I think the biggest complaint was that people couldn't hear the reporters that were phoning in. So they decided that they would just stop doing that. And then Megan at CCTV and I talked about how we could, you know, sort of fill that hole, help the Governor's office with some of the technical problems. And we were able to pretty scramble together some equipment and be able to get what turns out to be three times a week press conference for about COVID that the Governor's been doing at the pavilion. Get a stream going and then sort of deal with different audio problems. I mean, we, for the first few weeks, we had different audio channels and we had to figure out how can we combine those into one because people who were viewing it and we were getting a lot of people watching on YouTube who, you know, if at home they didn't have both channels coming through their speakers, they would think that they couldn't hear a particular mic because the podium mic hat had happened to be coming through the left channel. The telephone mic happened to be coming through the right channel and we had to figure out how to combine out of the camera without bringing an extra mixer into the mix. So we were finally able to do that, but I was I'm absolutely stunned at how many audio professionals there are in the comment section of the YouTube. So. Thank you. What's it been like for you to manage your team remotely? Am I allowed to say that I hate it? Of course you can. Tell us why. What are you missing? What are you missing? I just, you know, we work really in a sort of newsroom atmosphere where everybody kind of overhears everything and, you know, you know what's going on just by being in within earshot. So the first thing that I did the day we got back was start our own Slack workspace separate from Van because we had been using the Van workspace to just sort of DM you know, as a sort of a sub-channel and so we set up our own Slack workspace and started using that and that helped a little bit. We have a daily call every day at 10 a.m. which is our when we're supposed to open and we I got I ended up getting cable in my basement so that I could watch the channel because I do that all day long at the office and it's the only way I can feel like what we're doing is actually producing something you know is to kind of see how it actually looks so that that helped me to see that all this shouting into a webcam was actually resulting in something being able to be viewed by someone and, you know, I created a new organizational chart so that all of our producers all our field producers could see basically how all the handoff handing off goes between from person from staff to staff to staff to staff to staff so everybody could understand what their position in, you know, new workflow was anyway, it's been okay it's just not the way I want to work and it just feels so inefficient and, you know, it's kind of feels like the game of telephone a lot where I say something to someone they say someone else somebody else and then by the time I'm seeing what gets produced I'm like, what? You didn't nobody did what I said, you know and that's because I'm not directly talking to everyone at one time like we used to do anyway, I think a lot gets lost in the translation Tammy, are there ways that you are creating community and not just getting work done in your remote meetings with your staff? With the staff, yeah, you know we have a group that has been together for many years so we know each other very well and I think that that's been helpful two of my team members that are on the production team have terrible internet so that's been our biggest challenge in terms of connectivity with each other and production so one of my team members is driving down to our facility where we have 100 meg fiber internet and sitting in her car for staff meetings, you know and it's been interesting because the weather's getting nicer and nicer and yesterday she got to sit outside so that was great so, you know, we were doing more frequent meetings in the beginning to adjust to the workflow because we've had to completely redo years of workflow development and redo it like all of you in a week and we are using software we, you know, the last thing you want to do as a manager or leader is in a crisis to say, here, learn this new thing, right? But that's what I did and I didn't know how it was going to go but it's turned out okay so we've also migrated from using email to Slack which is a software that can have us all seeing the same messages rather than email so that's been it was hard at first I'm sure it was very annoying for the staff at first but it's worked out really well in terms of us being able to communicate and I think I always try to take time for everyone just to provide some personal you know, what's going on in your life how are things going and at the outset really like Angeliki said is letting people know that they're secure and the most important thing is for them to get their life and their families together because if we can't help ourselves first we can't help the community and so that's sort of how we started but we, you know, we miss the pizza parties that we have, you know every few months and, you know but at the end of the day everyone is really respectful of one another and we know each other well and we work well together so so we're we're moving on you know, we're making it happen as a team as best we can even with bad internet yeah Jared are you starting to think about the transition back now that the governor has signaled yes and no because we're in a challenging spot where we're still in a high school so even when, say, my staff can go back into the building and can work are we going to be allowed to let community members into the high school I mean, you know they're going to have their stringent rules of who can enter and so forth so it's going to be a challenge definitely when we start to come back you know, I've already let some of my staff members know that hey, you know in a sense if you need to go into the office for a little bit you could work in the office we're that, you know we're a small enough entity but my my programming coordinator the who does the scheduling he was already working remotely one or two days a week anyway before this whole thing came through so he's like, I'm okay I'll keep working remotely we've set it up I can do it so so, yeah it's going to be a challenge but I think we're ready to get back you know, some of us I am I've got two kids I'm watching every day so I would love to get back to the office but yeah I think it's good being in a high school is going to be I don't know what that means for us that's going to be the biggest challenge I think for for SAPA TV yeah Angelica tell us about something that has really inspired you in your community you're so connected there in Richmond and around um I was um thinking about that and I guess all this being far apart from each other it's cleared up in our minds what everyone does really well like we have the nonprofit NOFA Vermont in Richmond and they've really stepped up with their communications and doing so much work like to collect masks for farm workers or to collect money for farm workers I mean it's been very clear to us what they care about and they've communicated that really clearly to the public so that's been inspiring and that's the same for like our local grocery stores you know like we have a lot of really small ones that are going the extra mile and you realize that you know how important these very simple things are for everybody at this time so that's just been inspiring to to see people even though we don't see them all the time kind of like it's really brought to the forefront what people do well and we hope that the same has happened with the work that we do so do you think that this period of time is making a stronger case for the need for community media Angeli King yeah because one of the things that you know speaking to other public media centers it sort of took a little while to to be in my brain I was like wow we are essential too so it just it took a little time but once I knew that I was communicating it to my staff as an important kind of reminder they never were asked to go somewhere they didn't feel comfortable it's all been very voluntary like we are essential and yet we have some options which is nice in our position and just to go back to something Tammy had said earlier it's also cleared up for me how important the infrastructure we each have is at this time because I was like gosh I'm really glad we got that one gig local internet recently and boy I'm sure glad we bought a new $30,000 server broadcast server a couple years ago which allowed me to remote on I often edit at home and send all the files to work because the computer is better and the internet is better and it sort of does its thing from there so all those choices along the way to invest in our infrastructure have been really important Jamie what about you when you look ahead you mentioned two really important community issues that has happened during this time and you don't have a lot of news outlets in St. John's for eight so you seem to be essential there don't you think what does that mean going forward yeah I think that this was a big wake-up call for us you know the idea that Kingdom Access TV is an essential service we made it volunteer to come into work the first two weeks we did have two employees and we're very small we've got three full-time people and several part-time people so one of the part-timers started working from home exclusively a full-time person started working at home so it was really just Anthony and I coming in here so it was really very quiet I was in the admin office and Anthony was in the production office and as busy as we were and the outreach that we were doing I started to realize how important Kingdom Access TV is and you know all of us together Newport Community Television we're here in this vast northeast kingdom and there's so little information that's coming out of other parts of the state that deal directly with our area it can be very frustrating at times but it can also be a situation where any KTV or KUTV is the glue that holds the community together with good local solid information you know the advertising that we've been doing shortly after this started we were using tag lines like staying connected together that's been in our newspaper and our radio advertising and you know it's a great tag line but it's very much the truth the idea that we're available you know I'm working on weekends I don't know about the rest of you but I said to my wife about the second week into this every day is like town meeting live on KTV it's been just crazy but emailing people on the weekends evening reaching out to religious organizations community groups doing posts from Front Porch Forum to our Facebook page really wonderful story about the Jones Farm a local farm organic growers and they put together a list of 16 local farm stands in our area and it's like wow you can get chicken, beef, pork, vegetables, applesauce, maple syrup we really didn't worry much here in the N.E.K. about shortages thanks so much Rob you've not only been trying to serve the community need but you've also been involved in some statewide planning such as the statewide channel that we have been talking about building as Vermont Access Network and I wonder when you look to the future how viable and important do you think the work community media centers like yours your own are do so it's you know I've been thinking about this quite a lot and you know orca is unique and that we have the state house in our footprint so we really do have this whole sort of I thinking about how do we serve the state with access to what's going on in the state house and when this first came out you know started happening I got a call from the IT guy at the state house saying we're trying to figure out how can we do this if we are not actually in the state house and so you know he reached out and then they figured it out they used the Zoom platform to be able to stream to their own committee YouTube pages so now every committee in the state house I think almost all of them now have a YouTube channel that they can connect with any any constituent across the entire state so then I began to worry does that mean that we are now antiquated because we're you know it's now conceivable that after this is over they may keep those YouTube channels going with some sort of streaming camera in the in the state house so it'll be interesting for me to see you know do they continue to do this it's been exciting as far as you know in the general sense in that you know any Vermonter can now watch any sort of committee that's happening they don't actually have to be in that room which has always been a problem because the committee rooms are so small and you have a lot of people that are trying to get in and listen to this important stuff that's happening in the state house so you know you know we think about what's going to happen with the state house you know if every committee has a YouTube channel do we are we then no longer necessary do we begin to shift thinking about covering the chambers in some sort of v-span way or something like that you know particularly in thinking about you know what are we going to be using this statewide channel for in 2021 as far as the legislative you know so it's it's curious you know we can think about it and then even on a local level you know we have a number of smaller towns that just don't have the the capacity to think about you know streaming video and so my board has charged me with sort of even before this happened they they'd sort of charged me thinking about if you were going to set up some sort of way for them to be able to stream their meetings automatically without our help what would that look like and looking at what we now see with these zoom meetings there's a lot of problems that we had with sending a camera operated into a meeting that are being solved for instance you know anybody who's talking they're the primary person that comes up on the screen we can't do that so you can and so an activation is to being done by a microphone that's on a phone or on a laptop and I'm like could we use this to solve some of these problems that we don't want to invest all this infrastructure and capital money into could we take everybody who's at a meeting and they have their laptop or their phone and somehow tap into their microphone that's on that on that phone so that it's activated to a particular point that they're all zoom I don't know it's going to be really interesting to see what the future how it how it ends out core when Rob raises those questions what goes through your mind oh yeah we're doing the the same thing which is we are covering all sorts of meetings that we didn't use to cover like you know special meetings the drb of these tiny towns the you know people are just making recordings that our legislature is having these our delegations are having these weekend roundtable meetings on zoom and sending us the videos so you know I don't know what the cable viewers appetite for watching recorded zoom meetings is we kind of decided in this whole thing that are one of our big roles was bridging the gap between people who are online all the time and getting all their information online and people who are not as facile with that not as used to that and who are still consuming media by watching cable and so because you know people who are on facebook all the time are just seeing just this flood of information so what we decided our role was going to be was taking that relevant information to our community and getting that on cable in a way that it could be digested and in that way you know is there a role for us to bridge the gap between people who are willing to to go on to an online meeting to go to meeting and people who just want to know that their local government is being covered on video and archived and they can watch it if they want to watch it and there's accountability and there's transparency so it's a great question I wanted to say about the the inspiration part you know I do having watched these select board meetings a lot of them it is inspiring to see how many of them have really stepped up during this crisis I mean in my tiny town alone there's like a mutual aid organization there's a select board there's the emergency people are knocking going door to door trying to make sure every single neighbor is okay do you need groceries you know what you know are you sick what how can we help and I just think we're seeing a lot of Vermont towns really really step up in this and our channels are a reflection of that you know people get to experience that I also think that you know the the staff dedication that you're all alluding to where we all feel like we've been running a marathon since March 16th it's been really amazing how how staff has really been able to step up to learn new things learn learn slack learn how to use OBS and you know a lot of times I kind of hear sideways about how staff are just trying to help each other figure out how to do things and I find about it later and you know figuring out the home internet problem and the my computer doesn't work my laptop is crashing you know all that stuff it's pretty it's pretty amazing what everybody has been willing to to step up and take on in this whole thing thanks Core Jared I know that you've been involved in a regional discussion about how to be more perhaps more efficient and I wonder you know does this time of uncertainty also create possibilities in terms of how you might work together differently regionally um I I think so I mean you know I I think for us you know some some of the stations in this area they're part of the conversation I think this adding this COVID-19 this shelter in place gives them even more fear about what their financial funding what their funding is going to be in the future so I think that you know it's a very smart idea for us to be having the discussions that we're having to look at hey how can we work together or hey how do we consolidate the services we're offering and and so forth so I do think that it's you know and I don't know further stations throughout the the stator are looking at options like this but I do think it's a conversation that that is important and that you know things could possibly change quick and I think that having a an idea and a plan to to maybe work together and to be able to continue to provide the essential things that we're providing is important so yeah I think there's a way to do it like I said we're early in the process of our of our discussion and I'm already wondering wait you know how is this how is this really going to work how are we going to be able to provide the communities the same service if we do start consolidating these these things that we're talking about but I think there is a way to do it and I think that in the future it probably is what is what stations are going to have to do especially if we if we do see the funding drop drastically I hope we don't but I mean I hope I answered the question what you were asking but I do think it's important to be having these discussions and looking to the future of all of us working together to make sure that we have a voice and that we're providing these services thanks so much Jared Tammy you're looking forward to becoming the president of Vermont Access Network which means you get to herd all of the 25 cats that make up this amazing resource and I wonder what your thoughts are about the opportunities presented by this period for the movement of community media well I have to share with you all that probably three weeks in I think I was having a complete existential crisis about the work we were doing why we were doing it does it matter is anybody better off all of those questions and it was probably exhaustion stress coping you know and I came out of that with a renewed sense of what's important and and that we do matter and part of what got me out of that tailspin was the feedback that I heard from my community about the work we were doing I started getting thank yous hey thanks for what we're doing you know and part of it to piggyback on what Cora was saying Bennington County's population is an older population and so I had to remind many of our folks around that there are still cable viewers that are not on internet that are not on Facebook and we can't forget about them and it so so I spent a couple of weeks just reminding everybody all the stakeholders that yes you had your meeting and it's available on the internet but not everybody's on the internet and we have this beautiful platform so that's you know that's something that that I did so I think that what's going to come out of this and what's coming out of it for me is a renewed sense of our mission and purpose and our relevance to the community so I'm excited about how we're going to take the crisis and transform it to provide new services and also services in a different way and it's forced us to strip down our daily grind you know and and really think about what's important and so I'm kind of excited to see you know and I'm confident that we'll all work together and come out of it with with a bigger and better community media infrastructure and teams across the state so I'm out of my existential crisis and into you know hope and future and I'm excited I'm excited about it is anybody else have any closing comments they want to make or questions for other folks in the on the call and Gelekay yes go ahead there you go yeah so just in terms of you know future planning for the Vermont Exodus network that we're all a part of this has been a reminder to of our like we pride ourselves in our very local communities but it's been a reminder of like how important Rob's work does that they're actually sending a person to the state house even at this time to get us that clean feed of the governor's address how important that is and all the work of the committees and for the first time we've been putting things on our community bulletin board that are not in our three towns because it's been really important to look at things from a Vermont perspective so that's really something that we're gonna I think walk away from from all this fantastic any other closing thoughts or comments Jamie offer up that we would be doing what we're doing with Fairbanks Museum and others but if it wasn't for VMX it wouldn't have the statewide impact you know seeing that 10 or more AMOs are downloading those educational programs for K through 8 kids is just awesome and the idea that we can do it so easily through the Vermont media exchange is just a wonderful resource to have thanks that is and and you know just so people understand who are watching this is how programs get that someone might produce like the Tim Ash Facebook interviews that he's doing now it's an interview series the fact that you're processing that to get it up and share it with all of us so we can run it easily is a great resource and very much appreciated well I want to thank everybody it's just been a pleasure and a joy and just before we close we're going to just quick lightning round on what it is that you're doing to take care of yourselves because I think Jamie might have intimated every day it's a little bit like Groundhog Day there's just you know there's it's hard to know when it's the weekend and it's hard to know what day it is and so what are you doing to take care of yourself and maybe Rob why don't we start with you because I know that you're very good at that taking care of myself I don't know about that you have a hiddenness quality to you I love that well I think that you know part of it is just being able to spend so much time with my daughters you know we've been sheltered together with them and and having the ability you know my my oldest daughter was in her freshman year at college so she with that was cut short so she's been home and so being able to just to talk about you know how what it's like to be you know in a global sense of what does how this impact is impacts us all and brings us together and to think about those things it's just been really sort of interesting to to to watch it through the eyes of a 19 and a 16 year old so oh yeah that is that's a great blessing to be with them Cora how about you um I'm gonna have to think go to someone else all right Darren how about you how are you taking care of yourself well four-year-old and a two-year-old they're keeping me on my toes my wife works in the medical industry luckily on the more of the managerial side but so she's gone every day and so yeah but it's it's been awesome to actually be around my kids I actually got to see my little boy start walking so you know if you have a fat man daycare they probably would have got to enjoy that so and I'll tell you what I've never exercised so much in my life chasing two of those kids around the house so they're they're keeping me keeping me very happy and very let's just say tired at the same time but yeah I'm I'm doing great I'm surviving and and I'm keeping in touch with my staff and and so forth and it's just you know we're taking it one day at a time wonderful thank you Jamie how about you how are you taking care of yourself well you know part of it is the physical health considerations KUTV has policies in place to wear gloves where it's a shared computer or device and it's been very difficult to get masks but we created some social distancing rules we also completed the VOSHA certification and for anybody coming back I mentioned the people that are working from home they have to have the certificate with them and put it on their desk when they get here the other part of taking care is you know reaching out to people which I'd like to think we've always done at Kingdom Access TV personally tracking down neighbors and making sure especially elderly neighbors my mom my stepmother my mother-in-law you know making sure that these people are taken care of that they don't need something and I think a friendly voice is a wonderful thing too yeah call and talk yeah absolutely thank you Tammy how about you what are you what Netflix show are you watching yeah do you have time I wish I could watch more television I have a five-year-old so I'm kind of in in the realm of full-time parent full-time working trying to manage it all with my husband so I've been forcing myself to walk down the hill and back every day even if it's cold even if it's raining and getting that physical exercise and then also taking time for myself even if it's 10 minutes because you know we're home right the three of us and so it's been interesting and it's been a blessing but I was told yesterday by my child that that my attitude was not as fun as daddy's attitude so that's what I know you know it's it's I need to to step away and so it's been interesting and fun but really just trying to get outside as much as I can and walk up that dang hill it's it's a killer I bet it is yeah thanks court okay I got some ideas from you guys I am trying to get out a little bit outside and I have been gotten involved with the neighborhood mutual aid association and you know checking in on neighbors and stuff like that just anything I think one of the hardest things about being in a crisis is feeling like this particular crisis is feeling like you can't help anyone because we have to be distant and and that's not true and but it feels like that so making a mask and you know knocking on a door unannounced I've been doing that a lot my kids are both grown so they're taking care of themselves um and uh so um anyway I'm just trying to get outside of my tiny pod as much as I can said like a true community organizer absolutely I want to thank you all so much Rob Chapman of Orca based in Montpelier Quartro Bridge of B.C.T.V based in Brattleboro Jared Gannel based in Springfield at Sapa TV Angolique Contest who's in Richmond and they're abouts with M.M.C.T.V. and Tammy Riley in and around Manchester with Jeanette and Jamie Dimick of course holding down the fort in St. John'sbury part of the Northeast Kingdom I want to thank you all so much for all the work you do and for sharing some of your time with us today thanks a lot thanks for having us bye everybody see you all right good work thanks